Sitting Is The New Smoking- Are You A Serial Sitter?

Are you an oversitter? A University of Sydney study found that adults who sat 11 or more hours a day had a 40% increased risk of dying in the next three years compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day.

Sitting at work or at home for hours at a time could be cutting years off your life, doctors say.
“The chair is out to kill us,” James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, told the Los Angeles Times.

And it’s not just trouble for our tushes. Keeping your cheeks planted poisons the rest of the body as well, said Dr. Anup Kanodia of Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. “Sitting is the new smoking,” the doctor declared. The doctors weighed in after researchers in Australia discovered that serial sitting slows the metabolism and increases the risk of a heart attack and stroke.

Slugs who roost on their rumps at least 11 hours a day increased their death risk by 40%, they found.

“The average adult sits for 90% of their leisure time, so it seems there is some room for improvement,” said Dr. Hidde van der Ploeg of the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health. Sitting also suppresses the production of a molecule called lipoprotein lipase, which would otherwise metabolize fats and sugars, the researchers found.

*Translation: The more you sit, the fatter your backside gets.

So what's worse on longevity, sitting or smoking?

"Sitting is the new smoking," says Anup Kanodia, a physician and researcher at the Center for Personalized Health Care at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center. As evidence, he cites an Australian study published in October 2012 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that compared the two pastimes. Every hour of TV that people watch, presumably while sitting, cuts about 22 minutes from their life span, the study's authors calculated. By contrast, it's estimated that smokers shorten their lives by about 11 minutes per cigarette.

LONG BEACH, California — At the TED conference Tuesday, after Michigan’s governor lamented mass layoffs and before Bono praised poverty eradication progress, business writer Nilofer Merchant raised her own crucial issue: the quiet crisis of sore butts.

We’re sitting around too much at the office and particularly in meetings, says Merchant, a corporate director and former Autodesk executive. In classic TED fashion, Merchant found time in her short talk for a generous helping of statistics: People spend 9.3 hours per day on their derrieres, eclipsing even the 7.7 hours they spend sleeping. Their sedentary lifestyles contribute 10 percent of the risk of breast and colon cancer, 6 percent of the risk of heart disease, and 7 percent of the risk of type 2 diabetes.

The (ahem) bottom line is that sitting is a (usually) silent killer.

“Sitting is so incredibly prevalent we don’t even question it. It doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not OK.”

“Sitting is so incredibly prevalent that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it ,” Merchant told the TED audience. “And because everyone else is doing it, it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not OK.”

“In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.”

When it comes to finding a solution, Merchant isn’t farting around. She swears by the practice of holding “walk and talk” meetings and has been methodically switching her own business discussions out of fluorescent-lit conference rooms and cafés and into long walks, an idea that came to her when a colleague asked her to talk business while the colleague walked a dog. Merchant clocks 20-30 miles of walks per week and has held hundreds of strolling meetings.

“This changed my life,” she said in her talk. “You’ll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking.”

It’s no wonder Merchant’s talk went over as well as it did; she’s tapped into a hot topic in technology workplaces and other American offices. Responding to medical concerns about sitting, office equipment makers have created a dazzling variety of standing desks, which have in turn been embraced with particular enthusiasm by hackers and DIY builders.

The old idea of the “walk and talk” meeting, meanwhile, has gained new currency amid recent reports that Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is fond of the practice, as was Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey.

Of course, if the walk-and-talk meeting and standing desk are the carrots of butt liberation, guilt-inducing admonitions like Merchant’s are the stick. And if she can sell her message to an auditorium full of people who paid several thousand dollars each to sit on their tushes morning to night taking in speeches for an entire week, then she can probably convince anyone.

I enjoyed pulling these resources together to get this in front of you.  (~Just articles on this topic in a one-stop blog). Daily, I network with a group of professionals from across the U.S. and this was brought to my attention as we bantered back and forth on anti-aging topics, insights, and so on.  It really impacted me and I thought about all of you.  (And by the way, I'm standing up as I write this to followers.  I hope that as you're reading this, you too will consider the time you have now been sitting in front of your computer, TV, gaming system, etc.  I've never been one to sit still for very long (no comments please from those who really know me well) and feel it has a huge impact on my personal weight management. I've never been able to help a weight loss patient that wasn't willing to increase their activity level.  Perhaps physicians and practitioners should simply prescribe Rx: Movement.  Seems in order after reading this blog.  So, will you be sitting around watching TV tonight?  I think NOT!! 

To your good health,

Dr. Sonja