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.
So there is no reason to regularly exercise any more!
Sitting for eight or more hours a day can be deadly.
That fact has been hammered home in study after study showing the negative health effects -- including heart disease, poor circulation and joint pain -- associated with being parked on your behind for most of the day. The only sure way to prevent those problems, researchers have said, is to sit far less.
But there is growing evidence that there are ways to reverse the damage without necessarily committing to being on your feet for eight or more hours a day.
A new study by researchers at Indiana University published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise suggests that the impaired blood flow in leg arteries can actually be reversed by breaking up your sitting regimen with five-minute walking breaks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/08/take-a-seat-you-may-be-able-to-reverse-the-damage-to-your-health/
Considering how dangerous that desk job is...
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.
This really makes me wish it was the norm for employers to provide standing desks. It seems like the evidence is mounting that traditional desks are killing us. But since a decent adjustable standing desk costs ~ $700-$1500 US, they're seen as a luxury.
I'm not sure it would be a bad thing for OSHA to require employers to provide adjustable desks for office workers.
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.
Anything enjoyable, comfortable, or sinful is bad for you. Ideally, we should all work as rowers on a slave ship eating nothing but cardboard and water.
That must be why our ancestors in the past led such long, disease-free lives.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
from any cause"
Isn't the risk of death from any cause 100%? At least for us mortals?
Best Slashdot Co
I'm going to set my alarm clock to go off every hour at night so I can take a 5 minute walk. i'll live forever.
Are sedentary people more likely to die, or are people more likely to die sedentary?
Dead people are more likely to be sedentary.
I'm 150 pounds and 5'10" and used to drink a 20 ounce pop about once a day and eating fast food two or three times a week. That was balanced out by eating nothing more than what can fit in a small lunch bag for breakfast and lunch and dinner is typically a home cooked meal. Most of the time I could eat more but just ignore the hunger. That being said just getting off the 20 ounce pop means I don't have to watch what I eat nearly as much, these days I usually just drink pop when I'm too stressed out to pass it by.
Also I would say watch the alcohol consumption. I've seen coworkers put down more than one pitcher of beer and that is not low calorie.
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.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I just want to know how sitting on my ass all day increases my chance of being eaten by a shark by 15 to 20 percent.
You don't stand a chance against a Land Shark if you're sitting down.
We have a budding activist for a son (he's 12). We all stand at our desks at our house, but our son, of course, has to sit all day long at school. We're encouraging him to start campaigning for standing desks at his public school, for all children. Yeah, yeah, I know; it'd be a change, and change is difficult, but it seems that the benefits to our society would far outweigh the fixed costs and the socio-educational-cultural adjustments that would have to be made. My own lay estimate is that we'd eliminate most of the childhood type-2 diabetes and improve the classroom educational environment.
One of the issues with studies like this are they very specific and don't look at the associated environment(s). What I mean is most people who sit all day in a job can be pretty bored/stressed/hate their job kind of people. And since stress is also a contributor to some or all of the diseases ailments they mentioned who is to say that by sitting and working in a boring/stressful job isn't more of the factor than just sitting.
Delaying it is not going to make it any better or worse.
True enough. For death itself.
The thing to really fear is if sitting on your butt all the time increases the risk that you won't be able to enjoy sex for the last 10 years of your life because you'll be too sick to complete the sex act. Even when making love all by yourself. You won't have the heart for it any more. In a very literal way.
That's the true message here. Not that death will take the indolent sooner, but that if you develop one of the sedentary diseases, you will not be able to have much fun in the last, lingering, decades of your life.
Get off your keister and move around a bit. We've got the technology... take your coffee and lunch breaks with a walk with an audio book. Replace your computer desk with a treadmill equiped with a keyboard. Move your butt!
That might be a good rallying cry for all geeks: Move your butt.
Will
I don't think it's a matter of eating too much food as it having too much of our food be low nutrition or otherwise inappropriate food. If your body wants fat, and you cram it full of sugar, you aren't going to be filled, and you will shove your face through much more of it than your body needs in the process. Ironically, trying to eat healthy or trying to get others to eat healthy can be a big cause of this because it results in fighting and suppressing the urges of the body to meet its own needs.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is why I got my department to buy me a GeekDesk a couple of years ago. I don't stand all day every day, but it lets me stand quite a lot of the time.
Since then, my chronic low-grade upper-back stiffness has decreased a lot—but I find that on weekends, when I tend to sit on the couch with my laptop a lot, it frequently comes back. My legs still sometimes get tired from standing for a few hours at a time, but overall, I think it was a really, really good decision.
If you can't afford a GeekDesk, and think you can handle losing the chair cold turkey, there are much cheaper standing desks that can get you off your butt and on your feet—for your health! :-)
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I just want to know how sitting on my ass all day increases my chance of being eaten by a shark by 15 to 20 percent.
You don't stand a chance against a Land Shark if you're sitting down.
Plumber
I didn't ask for a plumber. Who is it?
Telegram
blog
Little cup is not a Burger King punishment. It is their management decision to limit the water cup size to make attempts to have soda in water cups impractical.
While stealing soda in Burger King sounds like a ridiculous idea, this option has been considered and addressed by reducing paper cup for water size.
Being Alive Shown to be Deadly.
After several years of exhaustive research, scientists have found that the greatest single contributor to death is being alive. "In 100% of the cases, the subjects death was preceded by a period of being alive," said one researcher. Even after eliminating other potential contributors, such as accidental death, suicide, etc. and adjusting for the age of the subject, the statistics remain strong. "If you are alive today, then you may die tomorrow."
With the rise of Obamacare, these findings could become even more vital, due to the potential effect that such details could have on the total cost of the program. "I think the insurance industry has known this for years, and has been keeping it away from public knowledge," said one official under condition of anonymity. One possibility would be to establish initiatives to curb the spread of being alive. "By reducing the number of people who are alive, we could significantly decrease the number of deaths, regardless of cause. This could amount to trillions of dollars in government savings, but I am not sure if the general public would be willing to give up on such a well established habit," he continued.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
5'10" and 150 lbs is a BMI of 21.5, which is about ideal.
You're saying that correlation is a leading cause of causation?