Slashdot Mirror
Regular Exercise Not Enough To Make Up For Sitting All Day
An anonymous reader writes: Toronto researchers have found the amount of time a person sits during the day is associated with a higher risk of disease and death, regardless of regular exercise. The paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine (abstract), found that prolonged sedentary behavior was associated with a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of death from any cause; a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of heart disease, death from heart disease, cancer, death from cancer; and as much as a 90 per cent increased risk of developing diabetes, said Alter. And that was after adjusting for the effects of regular exercise. ... Engaging in 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous daily exercise does not mean it's OK to then "sit on your rear" for the rest of the day.
I appreciate this and other studies that affirm that sitting most of the day is bad for you. What am I supposed to do about this? Like a great many professional workers, I work for a large, un-hip company whose furniture, real estate, and office layout is driven by cost and not ergonomics or health. I can't just decide to have a standing desk or reconfigure my 'workstation' -- arbitrarily, and due to client sensitivities I can't work from home. I guess I can just hope the news gets around and maybe my kids will get to have the choice.
In the pas few thousands of years, humans have always been mobile. And being mobile, I do not just mean walking. I mean moving around all day.
It is only in the past 75 or so years that we have started to do a LOT of nothing. We sit at our desk and the most we walk is to the printer.
Just look at pictures of 75 years ago and see how few cars there were. All these people and so few cars. They either walked, took a bike or at least walked to the train station. And now we have electric toothbrushes and don't stand up to switch channels.
So what has replaced the moving around all day? Nothing. We don't even stand up to go to the phone anymore.
I noticed this when I went sailing with some friends. On a sailing boat on the sea you move around all day when you just want to sit. Otherwise you fall over. The result was that I was aching all over as I used muscles I normally don't use.
Nothing has replaced what we used to do in the last few thousands of years.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You seem to have a very utopian idea of Europe. Don't worry, Europe is generally some ten years behind contemporary developments in the States but we are quickly catching up especially in rising obesity and directly linked diseases. The massive portion sizes in the States have not always been this huge and gradually grew. There are enough restaurants over here already offering ridiculously massive portions or all-you-can-eat buffets and they make it their main selling point. Oversize clothes stores can be found everywhere as well.
Yep, "American" portion sizes are a much more recent thing than people remember, hardly 20 years ago a typical medium fountain drink cup was called a large and a small was the size of a soda can. Triple cheese burgers didn't start showing up at places like Wendy's until around 15 years ago as well.
That said, we really do need to encourage people to drink more water.
If I go to a Burger King and just ask for tap water (for free) I get one of those tiny little cups you might get from a water cooler dispenser - maybe 1/6th the capacity of even a value soft drink. I'd need to refill it about 10 times during the course of a meal since I tend to drink a lot. So, I feel like I'm being punished for drinking water, which is of course the healthiest option there is.