Changing the way you sit could add years to your life
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
tldr: they squat
And an important paragraph: “Hadza men and women spent nearly 10 hours every day resting, almost identical to the numbers for people in the US, Netherlands and Australia. The number of breaks was similar across populations as well. Hadza adults switched from resting to active postures like standing or walking roughly 50 times per day, on par with data from Europeans. Still, Hadza blood profiles and blood pressures showed they were remarkably healthy, with low levels of triglycerides and other markers of heart disease. The Hadza were much healthier than their desk-bound counterparts in industrialised countries, but not because they rested less or got up to stretch their legs more often.”
I get the feeling that is less about the sitting and more about the activity you are doing outside of the sitting? Perhaps working out >30mins a day is just healthy for you and its not so much the sitting but the fact that people are sitting and not doing any type of physical activity throughout the day.
There is so many more things that are very different between them and industrialized counterparts, I feel this is at best a stretch that maybe it's all the squattings doing.
Seems the diet, sunlight exposure, environment, social habits, exercise habits, it's all different.
My back feels much better (I like to think that this is because of that). My coworkers are less happy because when I start bouncing during a video call they get sea sick :)
That’s priceless! :) Jokes aside, do you hold the laptop or camera? I don’t get why they get sea sick. When I look at a screen and see the camera moving vertically (up and down) while the person isn’t, I kinda feel a little bit like motion sickness (I don’t really have motion sickness otherwise). But if a person is moving vertically up and down but the camera level is still, I’m fine.
They are also joking about the fact that as soon as I start to think hard about something or make tough decisions I start to walk around and disappear from the camera. I do this without realizing and I told them I have to install these baby protections fences around my desk. Up to some time ago I had a wired headset so I was naturally sitting or close. Now with wireless i can walk around the living room freely :)
This implies a morning hunting or standing next to the coffee machine does not make a difference. Only the way they sit after that.
They studied a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania and found that despite having similar patterns of sedentary behaviour, their blood biomarkers of cardiometabolic dysfunction were much lower than those in industrialized nations. The authors posit that one reason for this is that sedentary behaviour in this group of individuals does not involve furniture -- rather, it usually involves a "deep squat", and the authors show that in this position the muscles are much more engaged than when someone sits in a chair.
This is consistent with evidence that breaking up periods of sitting with movement is good for you.
Their open-access paper talks about some evolutionary context for this hypothesis [1].
[1] 10.1073/pnas.1911868117