Those with a desk job, please stand up
17th October 2010
Teeing up the next fight with the Nanny State.
In academic papers with titles such as, “Your Chair: Comfortable but Deadly,” physicians point to surprising new research showing higher rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even mortality among people who sit for long stretches. A study earlier this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology showed that among 123,000 adults followed over 14 years, those who sat more than six hours a day were at least 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat less than three hours a day.
“Every rock we turn over when it comes to sitting is stunning,” said Marc Hamilton, a leading researcher on inactivity physiology at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. “Sitting is hazardous. It’s dangerous. We are on the cusp of a major revolution about what we think of as healthy behavior in the workplace.” He calls sitting “the new smoking.”
Not so fast, other experts say. Standing too much at work will cause more long-term back injuries – ask factory workers, they say. Incidences of varicose veins among women will increase. The heart will have to pump more. Alan Hedge, a noted ergonomics scholar at Cornell University, went so far as to call standing at work “one of the stupidest things one would ever want to do. This is the high heels of the furniture industry.”