“Sitting too much will probably shorten your life. That might sound ridiculous — or obvious — depending on your perspective, but the findings don’t come from a fringe study. They come from the American Cancer Society, whose researchers studied 123,000 people’s health outcomes during a 14-year period” … with 20-40% higher risk of dying early due to sitting a certain number of hours per workday.
Add to that a recent study from “The American Journal of Epidemiology finding that those who work a sedentary job have almost twice the risk of a specific type of colon cancer.”
Are you standing yet (as you read this blog posting)? 🙂
This article caught my attention. At first I wondered if it was a joke or just an attention-getter title. But as I read the article and all of the research that has been recently published on this topic, as an avid desktop computer user, I wasn’t too pleased with what it was saying. It was talking about early death, about significantly higher risk of cancer. And this one paragraph put this unexpected bad news into a very unpleasant context by saying:
What’s particularly interesting about recent research is the revelation that sitting for extended periods of time does significant damage to human health that cannot be undone by exercising. Sitting for several hours each day is bad for you, like smoking is bad for you, regardless of whether you do healthful activities, too.
Bummer. (pun intended)
Read the article. Become informed. Maybe even consider some of the suggestions:
Article: Sitting for hours can shave years off life
Article by William Hudson, CNN staff, on the CNN Health website on June 24, 2011 with research and studies from a number of well-known health organizations.