Everyone seems to be saying it; “Your chair will kill you!”

A quick Google search confirms it and everyone from the Guardian in the UK to the Mayo clinic in the US has written something about it. But what does it actually mean? How is it that “sitting is the new smoking”? I wanted to give you the facts on this modern day peril but more importantly I wanted to share with you some ways to combat it and not take it sitting down…so to speak.

So, let’s start with the facts.

A study published in the Journal Diabetologia in November 2012 compared people who spent a lot of time sitting with those who spent very little time sitting, the researchers found that prolonged sitting increases in the risks of;

diabetes (112%)
cardiovascular events (147%)
death from cardiovascular causes (90%)
death from all causes (49%)
Are you looking at your office chair differently now?

So why the comparison to smoking? Well, that stems from an article in the LA times in which Anup Kanodia, a physician and researcher at the Center for Personalized Health Care at Ohio State University said “Sitting is the new smoking”. He was referring to two pieces of research; One is an Australian study published in October 2012 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that concluded that for every hour of TV that people watch, presumably while sitting, it cuts about 22 minutes from their life span. The other study was published in 2000 in the British Journal of Medicine, which estimated that smokers shorten their lives by about 11 minutes per cigarette, in other words, sitting is worse than smoking.

“But I work out every morning”, yes, I hear you but…

Will that morning workout be the bandage to the ills of sitting? Probably not was the conclusion of a 2010 study in the American Journal of Epidemiolgy which showed that it’s what you do during the rest of the day that makes a difference. Of course the calories burned in the morning won’t be stored as fat so it may keep you trim, but that doesn’t counteract the effects of a day sitting. The researchers followed 123,000 people for 13 years and found that men who sat for most of the day were 18% more likely to die during the study than those who didn’t. It was worse news for women though, as their risk increased by 37%. Those results were unaffected by how much exercises the participants reported getting.

So what’s the antedote?

It depends on how extreme you want to go. You could go as far as James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine famed for saying “The chair is out to kill us”. To outwit his would be assassin he has installed a treadmill in his office so he can stroll along all day. Or you can do what most experts recommend and take a series of small breaks every 30-60 minutes during your work day to walk, stretch and stand up. There is free downloadable software from companies like Workwave (www.workrave.org) which provide periodic alerts to remind you take these breaks.

From an osteopathic point of view we look at clients who work in an office as “professional sitters”. Anyone who does something for 8 plus hours a day, 5 days a week, year after year, should technically earn the status of professional, right?

Next month, In part 2 of our newsletter we will share with you ways to train your body whilst sitting so that you can mitigate some of these dangers and maybe even become a better sitter!

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