A 2-Minute Walk May Counter the Harms of Sitting | Hacker News Reader

A 2-Minute Walk May Counter the Harms of Sitting

well.blogs.nytimes.com

66 pointspeterkrieg36 comments

"scientists found that every hour that overweight adults spent watching television, which is a handy way to measure sitting time at home, increased their risk of becoming diabetic by 3.4 percent"

I think that should be every hour per day. It sounds quite dire otherwise. It reminds me of this satirical piece in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/switched-standin...

Whoa, that link is gold :)

This is very anecdotal, but recently I moved to live a 15 minute walk from my office. Since the car keys went away and the walk to and from the office was introduced, I feel much healthier and happier.

Now it could be that I moved, so there are certainly possible external factors that are not the walk, but I really do feel it is the walk that is the major contributor to my days feeling so much better.

I've even found myself justifying silly things to myself just to keep the walk up. For example, the other day I was running late but I still wanted to walk. Walking in and not being late was impossible, so I caught a taxi into the office, just so I could walk home without worrying about leaving my car behind.

Walking is great.

The money you'll save by walking instead of driving to work will more than make up for the occasional cab ride!

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/336809-above-all-do-not-lose...

Helps me think. Seriously, taking a walk is the best way to form a strategy over how to tackle a specific problem, what to chose in this or that circumstance and so forth.

The sample is 3626 men and women, generally healthy at the start of the study. Could there really have been "enough" deaths after 3 or 5 years to even make a guess at the reduction in death rate due to exercise, moving around or any thing else. I doubt it. I am not saying the study is faulty, just pointing out a possible problem.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_is_not_causation

https://xkcd.com/552/

I can't figure out why I keep seeing this comic in conversations like this.

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/552:_Correlation

"This reduction in death risk is likely related to energy balance, Dr. Beddhu said. Strolling instead of sitting increases the number of calories that someone burns, potentially contributing to weight loss and other metabolic changes, which then affect mortality risk."

Did the study classify participants by BMI class at all[1]? I work as a teacher so I'm on my feet and moving round a class most of the time at work and when not teaching I'm going around getting stuff &c. Very little sitting at a PC. I also walk to and from a railway station each day (2* 1.7 miles). I am stubbornly a chunky 29.5 BMI.

You can't outrun the fork.

Yup, true enough. And the glass (couple of Guinesses tonight after a hard day). Just wondering if the data set has been controlled against that variable.

Switch to a lighter beer or hard liquor, lol, solved!

I agree with the sentiment behind the expression, but I find my fork has trouble keeping up with my legs!

When I began a new job about a year ago, I found out my completely modular cube had the capacity for me to change the height of my desk.

At that point, I raised it up to standing level, bought a standing mat from Home Depot, and never looked back.

I know that standing desks tend to get a bit of a cult following, but I'll say that I just feel better standing all day. There was a break-in period of about 3 weeks, and I bought some lighter-weight shoes, but after that point I found myself more productive and engaged at work.

I use both a standing desk and a sitting one, and agree with you on the three-week burn-in.

But while the benefits of standing desks are plausible, it is very important to remember that they have an unequivocal, well-documented, peer-reviewed, scientifically solid set of risks associated with them: http://www.hazards.org/standing/

That is, there are well-documented health issues with standing all day, and of course, putting desk after standing doesn't change the physics or the physiology of the process. This does not mean your standing desk or mine will kill us, just that it's worth paying attention to any potential downsides developing.

This is why I've prematurely moved to the next trend, the stop-start-jog-walk-stand-sprint-walk-jog office desk treadmill cycle. The cycle is meant to simulate our caveman activity cycle, with a lot of walking, jogging, some waiting, and the occasional sprint from predators and towards pray. Sometimes I spill my coffee on myself when the treadmill suddenly ramps up from a walk or a stand-still to a sprint, but research shows[1] that things like spilling coffee on yourself induces a slight stress response. Which is great, since I need some authentic stress variables in order to simulate some of the stressors of my hunter-gatherer heritage.

[1] TBA; this trend is too underground right now. The research will follow soon.

Even treadmill desks are coming under fire now... it seems you just can't win.

http://www.katysays.com/junk-food-walking/

> there are well-documented health issues with standing all day

It's almost as if we are all going to die eventually no matter what we do.

I agree. Luckily my job doesn't require to be only at my desk to be productive. I really feel better the more I just move during the day. Standing in one position is exhausting; walking over to a coworker's cube instead of IMing or going on a walk instead of internet browsing adds a lot of motion.

This isn't surprising news.

Isn't this one of Apple's main goals in their Activity app (w/ the Apple Watch)? To get around and move for a couple minutes each hour at least 12 times a day? Lots of other fitness bands have done this as well (Jawbone Up comes to mind).

Relevant article from a few years ago:

http://lifehacker.com/5879536/how-sitting-all-day-is-damagin...

People always guess that calorie burn is the reason sitting is harmful, but I think it has to do more with blood flow and cell pressure. Getting up once every 30-60 minutes and shaking my legs out and stretching seems to reduce that effect quite a bit.

Sitting for long periods may be bad for our health now, but guarantee in 2 years (or whatever) they tell us it actually has long-lasting benefits. At which point, gamers and office workers will be vindicated!

Your body was made to move not to sit too many hours :-). I doubt games and office workers will ever be vindicated :-P

But I already shelled out good money for my doe desk!

https://xkcd.com/1329/

Fortunately my Diet Dr. Pepper habit has me getting up and walking regularly :-) Now to move the fridge 1 minute away from where I normally sit ...

The study was done 10 years ago with less than 4000 people over a period of 1 year.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25931456

Is that really enough evidence to conclude anything?

3600 people is a pretty good sample size. The limitation here is that it's observational rather than a controlled intervention. So, you could say, perhaps those who were sicker moved around less. Rather than movement leading to improved health, improved health could lead to movement.

That said, if it's the best evidence we have, it might be reasonable to suggest that people spend a bit more time moving around until we get more evidence. The intervention is very unlikely to be harmful, costs virtually nothing, is easy to do, and could be helpful.

...or it might do absolutely nothing for you. We might find out 10 years from now that standin up every 10 minutes and doing 20 squats works, for example.

People get a little tired of meaningless study after study articles. "Well, it couldn't hurt" gets old too.

Instead, I take these studies with a pinch of salt and also judge how I feel sitting all day (fairly bad) vs taking breaks to jog on spot every so often (fairly good).

EDIT: But I do think the title is overly optimistic, personally

Yes, sitting all day is bad. That study was done decades ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/research/08morris.h...

Maybe once a few more people become tired of these "results", we can devise better studies or use better science to measure our "health".

Once enough people are using wearables with fitness tracking and built-in reminders of when to take a break we will be able to run good large scale A/B testing with robust data collection.

Simply increase the time interval between breaks by different amounts for large randomly selected subgroups and measure the health impacts over an extended period of time.

/s (because of Poe)

I think there's something odd about our society if suddenly we are all deathly afraid of chairs.

It should be lions. We need to reintroduce lions into our suburbs.

What? Your suburbs didn't originally have lions? More reason to add them then.

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