"Living With" Product Review: The GeekDesk Truly Transforms the Way You Work. Chances are you're sitting on your ass right now, whether you're reading this on your computer or a mobile device. And I've got bad news: Sitting on your ass is not good for you. The simple act of sitting makes you fatter, raises your cholesterol, spoils your metabolism and takes years off your life. "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? " an excellent article recently published in the Times, highlighted why by looking at research from the Mayo Clinic, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Circulation magazine and the American Cancer Society. An excerpt: This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops—"the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse," [researcher Marc] Hamilton says—leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects.
Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges...Insulin effectiveness drops...the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. The solution is to not sit so much, but that doesn't jive with your average job that involves a desk. Sitting is Deadly, Mounting Research Reveals | Sedentary Behavior Leads to Type 2 Diabetes & Heart Disease | My Health News Daily. Did you hit the gym today? If so, you probably feel like you deserve a pat on the back. But your efforts may be in vain if you spend the rest of the day sitting down. A growing body of research suggests sitting down for most of the day can be lethal. It has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and death from any cause. And a daily jog may do little to negate the deleterious effects of too much time in a chair.
"The robotic lifestyle of just incorporating 30 minutes of physical activity into your day," and spending the other 23.5 hours idle, "does not produce the healthy profile we're looking for," said Mark Tremblay, director of healthy active living and obesity research at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. While much research has focused on the benefits of physical activity, little attention was paid to what people do the rest of the day. An idle body And sitting makes it easy to eat. Lethal consequences. Prolonged Sitting Linked to Breast and Colon Cancers. WASHINGTON — Our culture of sitting may be responsible for 173,000 cases of cancer each year, according to new estimates. Physical inactivity is linked to as many as 49,000 cases of breast cancer and 43,000 cases of colon cancer a year in the United States, said Christine Friedenreich, an epidemiologist at Alberta Health Services-Cancer Care in Canada.
Breast and colon cancer appear to be the cancers most influenced by physical activity, according to the research we have to date, Friedenreich said, in presenting her findings here today (Nov. 3) at the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) conference. But her findings also suggested that an estimated 37,200 cases of lung cancer, 30,600 cases of prostate cancer, 12,000 cases of endometrial cancer and 1,800 cases of ovarian cancer could be prevented if people were more physically active. The amount of time we spend standing up and walking "makes up such a tiny sliver of a person's waking hours," Owen said. However, there's good news. Health | More office workers take stand against sitting. Originally published October 17, 2010 at 10:01 PM | Page modified October 18, 2010 at 6:33 AM Mark Ramirez, a senior executive at AOL, could work in the cushiest leather chair, if he wanted.
No, thanks. He prefers to stand most of the day at a desk raised above stomach level. "I've got my knees bent, I feel totally alive," he said. In the past few years, standing has become the new sitting for 10 percent of AOL employees at the firm's Virginia campus, part of a standing ovation among accountants, programmers, telemarketers and other office workers across the nation. GeekDesk, a California firm that sells $800 desks raised by electric motors, says sales will triple this year. Standers give various reasons for taking to their feet: It makes them feel more focused, prevents drowsiness, makes them feel like a general even if they just push paper. Not so fast, other experts say. What everyone can agree on, though, is that we were not exactly built to sit. No Really – Sitting Is Killing You. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Obesity Panacea, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed.
Also, don't forget to like us on Facebook! Earlier this year I posted an infographic on the health impact of sedentary behaviour which has generated plenty of discussion both here and elsewhere. Many people are understandably skeptical about the relationship between sedentary behaviour and mortality, so I was excited about the recent publication of two recent systematic reviews focusing on just this issue. The first, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by Karin Proper and colleagues, focused on the prospective association between sedentary behaviour and obesity, CVD and diabetes risk, as well as mortality.
Somewhat surprisingly, they found little evidence that sedentary behaviour was associated with increased body weight or other health risk factors, despite consistent associations between sedentary behaviour and risk of death. Weight Gain: Travis. TV addicts risk heart disease, study finds - News, TV & Radio. Couch potatoes were warned that their lifestyle also increased the risk of death from other causes including cancer. Individuals who spent hours watching television greatly heightened the chances of dying early from heart attacks and strokes, they found. Compared with those watching less than two hours of TV, people who sat in front of the box for more than four hours a day were 80% more likely to die for reasons linked to heart and artery disease. Researchers in Australia monitored 8,800 adults for six years to see what impact watching TV had on their long term health. They found that each hour spent per day in front of the television increased the risk of death from all causes by 11%.
It also raised the risk of dying from cancer by 9% and the risk of heart disease-related death by 18%. The scientists warned that it was not only telly addicts whose lazy lifestyles put them in danger. It also made no difference whether or not a person was overweight or obese. Back Straight Boys want to fix your bad posture | Crave. Baby, it's the way you make me kinda get me sit straightly, never wanna stop.
The Back Straight Boys aren't singing that tune yet, but they probably should be. The teenagers did, after all, name themselves after the boy band Backstreet Boys. But instead of targeting screaming teens, they're targeting screaming adults--screaming in pain, that is--with a device that aims to prevent poor workstation posture by monitoring wearers' stance and training them to correct it when needed. Sean Colford, Ethan Epstein, Brandon Loye, and Michael Walsh, all of San Diego and just out of their freshman year of high school, came up with the idea for Posture Pad back in middle school after experiencing firsthand the discomfort computer use can cause.
"We noticed that at school, all the computer workstations were the same size, but Ethan and I had a 15-inch difference in height," Loye said. "I had to hunch my back to see the monitor, and Ethan had to sit on his legs. Sitting is Killing You. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Obesity Panacea, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Also, don't forget to like us on Facebook! Sedentary behaviour is the topic of my PhD thesis, and as a result we discuss it quite frequently here at Obesity Panacea.
But never have I seen anything even remotely approaching the coolness of the following evidence-based infograph, which was produced by Medical Billing and Coding. If this doesn’t clearly convey the health-impact of sedentary behaviour, nothing will. Enjoy! Travis Via: Medical Billing And Coding. Your chair is trying to kill you... You might be pleased with that cool looking Aeron chair your buns are nestled in — but it's nothing but a stylish killer. Recent studies have shown that the amount of time you spend sitting raises your risk of dying. Sit more, die sooner. An Australian study of 8,800 people over a six year period found that for each hour spent sitting increased the risk of death from heart disease by one-fifth. It can't be long before US lawyers begin filing class-action lawsuits against well-heeled chair makers, for not warning innocent sitters that they are risking their lives.
In the near future, you might be required to sign wavers that you understand the risks before being able to buy a chair, or sit in an office chair. Exercise doesn't help... Take a look at this Canadian study: . . .a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.