'The chair is out to kill us'. Studies point to the health risks of sitting
latimes.com
latimes.com
Let's say person A burns 1000 calories a day at his job, and only sits for a few hours when he goes home. Person B burns 1000 calories in his off time, but sits at work for 8 hours. Is person B still more likely to suffer health defects and die early? If so, why?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218159
Now, I'd love to see a randomized trial over a long time period to find out whether sitting actually causes bad health, or is just correlated.
The best natural experiment was the London bus driver study which showed huge differences in heart problems between drivers (sitting all day) and conductors (standing all day). Both were drawn from the same pool of employees and randomly assigned roles, so the experiment was naturally controlled for everything except the difference in behavior.
There were some other differences such as drivers having a more stressful job and conductors having more social interactions which might explain some of the differences in outcomes apart from the sitting/moving difference. But in any case, sitting for hours a day at a stressful job with minimal social interaction is incredibly bad for your health. Programmers take note!
Or, straight to the point, if there was a study involving standing programmer and sitting programmers... preferably one in which the roles were randomized, because I'd suspect that programmers who've already chosen to stand while they work are probably a more health-conscious lot as it is.
One should also keep in mind that while correlation =/= causation, showing a strong correlation is a step along the path toward showing causation.
I'd also like to see some real evidence.
Saying it's necessary to drink that much water might be ridiculous, and perhaps that's what you meant, but I don't think there's anything ridiculous about the activity itself.
What about diluting/pissing away vitamins and other essential compounds?
>I easily drink 48-144oz of pure water per day with the 48oz bottle I carry with me everywhere I go
Is this because you are constantly thirsty? If so you may want to be tested for diabetes.
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/122/7/743.full#ref-1
Edit: sorry someone else had a better link:
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/579181_296764684...
At my computer keyboard, where I live continually, I sit on an exercise ball rather than any kind of chair. Even at that, I should probably get up and move around more, but at least I have the routine of a homeschooling parent of three children still living at home to provide interruptions and occasions to change my posture. It's hard to optimize for everything, but so far I've avoided the worst of the health symptoms mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, even though I am already of middle age.
It is in part, as in you might sit for 13 hours a day so 30 mins less sitting makes you 3% better off but really it's not the solution. Similarly to getting up and walking around, if you do it 5 mins ever hour that's 4% better off.
My understanding is these studies are saying to make change you need to stop sitting for large periods of time (ie reduce by 50+%), if you don't want to die/become crippled early.
I believe one of his thesis was that to much sitting led to horrors like the Rolling stones and the whole permissive 60’s
He was a well known sight to any one who worked in central London pre 1993 when he died.
"Sitting" (or more specifically, the way I "sit" all day) resulted in me having pretty awful back pain that required treatment earlier this year. I had bad posture spent 4-5 hours stationary writing code. Having a standing desk would have probably helped me to take more breaks and move around. A little app called Kitchen Timer, combined with a very mild set of stretching/exercises works for me now. I don't have heart problems. My "inputs" match my "outputs". I've maintained my weight within 5 pounds for 10 years.
The thing that bothers me about this article is the way it's presented. It's designed to scare ... and I know first hand that it works. Growing up, my mom wouldn't let me stand anywhere near the microwave because of something she saw on 20/20. We heated up food the same way we lit fireworks ("strike" and "run!") When I purchased my first cell phone she panicked about the RADIATION and warned me against using it regularly (Chernobyl === Magnetron to her). My mom watched 20/20 all the time!
I have no interest in a standing desk. I work well sitting down, and the timer gives me a nice reminder to stretch out which I can choose to ignore if I'm focused on something I can't pull away from. I smoked as a teenager ... maybe I'm being naive and using anec-data, but my chair is no Marlboro.
Hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891
I could probably use Pomodoro or any similar cycle and also get good results, I just happened to try this first.
However, I like thinking about ergonomics. Do many people here recline while working? I've been working for a year now, laying back on a couch, feet up and head on a pillow. It works well, but even before this I had carpal tunnel which this doesn't help (it did for a while though). I've resorted to padded gloves that ease my pain:
http://www.activeforever.com/smart-glove-wrist-support?produ...
I've been using a GeekDesk for 2 years now. I recently purchased a LifeSpan Treadmill (just the base) for my standing desk as the next step, and really like it. Careful though, you can't go from sitting to treadmill, it's too much body shock, you'll need to ease into standing for a few months first.
I've been thinking about getting a sit/stand desk for a while, but don't like the electric ones as they seem really slow. This seems the nicest of the manually operated ones (better looking than the steelcase one IMO).
Can that be real? That's a very serious issue if true.
In this case, "The authors constructed a life table model that incorporates a previously reported mortality risk associated with TV time. Data were from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, a national population-based observational survey that started in 1999–2000. The authors modelled impacts of changes in population average TV viewing time on life expectancy at birth."
We thereby have to ask, what is the more likely explanation: that sitting causes your life span to decrease, or that the same things that cause your life span to decrease make sitting, or watching television, something you do more often? We aren't doing experiments where we assign people into groups, one which will sit for most of their life and one which will stand/walk, so we can't assume the causation.
Maybe you don't have any friends, and maybe that is why you sit inside all day watching the television. Some people believe being a social outcast directly leads to health issues, but one could also point out that friends often are the people who goad you into seeing the doctor for that thing you never cared enough about, or are quite literally the people who pick you up when you fall, maybe calling 911.
Alternatively, it could be that your life really sucks, and you need the outlet of watching television to make your life feel more reasonable. Things that cause peoples' lives to suck might be abusive relationships, chronic illness, or stressful jobs (and other studies, I believe even real experiments, and I even further believe demonstrated mechanisms, show that stress leads to health problems).
Some might argue "it is easy to control for people who are dying and remove them from your study", but it is very difficult to control for subtle effects, and we are talking about a subtle effect here. This is especially true once you look into compliance effects: people who don't sit around all day watching television are probably also the kinds of people who visit the dentist regularly, or simply eat better food.
The result of this mistake is that it could even be dangerous to be making claims that sitting reduces your lifespan: maybe by telling the people who are sitting around watching television that its unhealthy for them (again, based on no direct evidence) causes them to now feel bad about watching television, increasing their stress, or even causes them to push themselves even further to exercise, when they were sitting down because their knee was already giving out.
A lot of people, at this point, get angry at shoddy science reporting. That's a real problem: articles like this blow studies that are correlations into causations. The result is that people hear every couple years opposing information on some debates they care about (such as whether something like wine or aspirin is "good for your heart"), and eventually decide "it isn't like scientists know anything" and "give it a year, we'll learn something new", something they then apply to other branches of science (like evolution).
But, frankly: the scientists who are publishing these papers really need to use less ambiguous wording--especially if they are not going to be really proactive reaching out to press to be involved in the writing of the articles, making certain the right kinds of hedges get quoted by the reporters (which may scuttle the article, as maybe it is no longer interesting to them: in comparison to bad information spreading, less reporting should be a positive thing)--as I think they are complicit in the confusion.
This paper uses wording that technically doesn't imply a correlation if you know what all of the words mean and you are careful with your reading, but to any normal person they are quite clearly saying "X causes Y": "The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 8.4 days to 3.7 years) for men and 1.5 years (95% UI: 6.8 days to 3.1 years) for women...".
When I read that, I know that that just means "if I'm building a probability distribution over the life expectancy of a person (who would be similar to the people studied, potentially including 'having not heard about this study') and I know how much TV they watch I can use that information to adjust my expectation based on this metric, as established by this well-founded study". However, "X reduced life expectancy" to normal people means "if I do X it will reduce my life expectancy, and if I avoid X, I can avoid that effect".
:(