5 ms·
Sitting All Day: Worse For You Than You Might Think
- andrewvc 15y agoMaybe this has no basis in reality, but one reason I stopped cycling as a primary form of cardio ( I run now ) is I just felt wrong moving from sitting at a computer to sitting on a bike.
- beaumartinez 15y agoSo don't sit on your saddle—take it off. (Bonus reason: saddles {with a nose} also cause erectile dysfunction; I don't have any sources at hand but I'm sure if you search you will find).
- mjallday 15y agoIt appears you're onto something with the erectile dysfunction. Apparently however, it's not that common and you can get seats that minimise the issue. http://bicyclehabitat.com/articles/saddle-seats-and-erectile-dysfunction-the-myth-exploded-pg97.htm http://bicyclehabitat.com/articles/saddle-seats-and-erectile... http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/cyclingworkouts/a/BikingImpotence.htm http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/cyclingworkouts/a/BikingI... http://www.webmd.com/erectile-dysfunction/news/20050825/studies-link-bike-seats-erectile-dysfunction http://www.webmd.com/erectile-dysfunction/news/20050825/stud...
- kaens 15y agoI thought you weren't supposed to really "sit" most of the time on a bike -- mostly more of a crouch type of thing.
- rbxbx 15y agoRelated article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298/ns/health-mens_health/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298/ns/health-mens_health/ Previous HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834671 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834671 ps: standing desk :)
- shii 15y agoAlso see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311857 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311857
- lpolovets 15y agoI am not going to disagree with the article or dispute that sitting all day is not as healthy as occasionally moving around, but does anyone else feel like this is the latest "health scare" meme? It reminds me of how leg embolisms on long flights were the focus of attention a few years ago. (i.e. completely absent from the news at first, then an overabundance of stories once a single scientific study is published.)
- de90 15y agoNo doubt it is. I think it's just a problem with us understanding more. There is always going to be, taking to much of something, too little of something else, doing to much of x, doing to little of x. Things that are good for us are bad in large amounts (vitamins), and things that are bad can be used for 'good' (botox). Find what works for you, and makes you feel how you want, and stick with it. There will never be better advice since everyone is different. But where is the scare in that? :)
- lpolovets 15y agoI think the scare is the explicit statement that exercising is not enough. If that is the case, then I will make adjustments to my work/sitting habits; if it's not the case, I'm pretty happy with my current status quo of sitting most of the day and then doing a challenging workout at night. However, all of these recent sitting news articles seem to be based on the same study. Perhaps the study is flawless, or perhaps the data collection was flawed, or the results can't be replicated, or something else went wrong. In that case, the news stories are prematurely trying to worry people into being into sitting less. I think being active is awesome, but it should be something you do because you enjoy it, or because you have weighed the pros and cons and decided it's worthwhile; it should not be something you do because you were misled about the the health risks.
- joahua 15y agoParticular reason for scarequotes around 'good' re: botox? Cosmetic surgery connotations aside, botox is used for (quite effective) treatment of cerebal palsy / muscle spasticity.
- vehementi 15y agoIs there data that excludes obese people?
- LarryA 15y agoI'm totally all for having recess, and we need more playgrounds for us older kids. :-D (Imagine the recess scene in the spoof movie Fatal Instinct) To that - with my hours cutback at work I now have a home office with a standing/sitting desk now, it's great.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kleiba 15y ago[...] he found that men who reported more than 23 hours a week of sedentary activity had a 64 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than those who reported less than 11 hours a week of sedentary activity Wow, there are people who sit only 1.5 hours per day on average? I spend more time sitting on my way to work and back alone.
- andrewjshults 15y agoIf it's self reported (which seems to be the case from the article, I could imagine that people reporting under 11 hours might be using different criteria for what they really consider sedentary activity compared to those that report over 23 hours a week. I fall closer to the 11 hours a week (standing desk, bike to work, bar height dining table at home) but agree that even with all of that it'd be rare that I'd be sitting for less than 1.5 hours a day (especially factoring in weekends).
- ck2 15y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450170 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450170 Between this sitting-is-death and the sugar-is-death, there should be tens of millions of dead office workers who died before 60 in the past few decades.
- arn 15y agowell, heart disease is the number one cause of death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
- kragen 15y agohttp://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html says 12% of all people in the US would die before the age of 60 at current age-group death rates. Currently about 2.4 million people die in the US per year http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/deaths.htm, so probably about 50 million have died over the last three decades. All developed countries together are about triple the population of the US, so 150 million total deaths. Let's say half of these were white-collar workers, or 75 million. If early death is independent of white-collar status, then you'd expect about 10 million dead office workers who died before 60 in the past few decades, even if sitting and sugar have no effects on death risk.
- brown9-2 15y agoThe New York Times magazine published a longer article on the same subject a few weeks ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.h...
- j_baker 15y agoI don't see any evidence that this is causation and not just correlation. I'd believe that people who sit more are at higher risk for heart attack. But I'd also argue that those people are more likely to get less exercise.
- msluyter 15y agoBut didn't these studies control for exercise? But now, researchers are beginning to suspect that even if you engage in regular exercise daily, it may not be enough to counteract the effects of too much sitting during the rest of the day.
- assiotis 15y agoThat is not what the researchers suspect. The article misquotes the study. You only have to go as far as the abstract to find: "Regardless of the amount of sedentary activity reported by these men, being older, having normal weight, being normotensive, and being physically active were associated with a reduced risk of CVD death."
- DanielStraight 15y agoI'm only one data point, but I felt significantly better in two or three days after hacking together a sit/stand desk. I can point to specific aches, pains and other minor medical issues that I simply no longer have now that I divide my time between sitting and standing.
- SomeCallMeTim 15y agoI'm another data point. Built my own standing desk and bought a drafting chair; I frequently stand most of the day, and it's improved my posture markedly. I'd gone through a series of various expensive "ergo" chairs, and yet I would get a feeling of suffocation when sitting for too long. Now I can work for extended periods without the need to "get up and walk around." And when particularly good music comes on the radio, I can dance to it during compiles. Yes, I work in an office where no one can see me. ;)
- Isamu 15y agoIt took me more like a month to get used to it after I set up my standing desk. I feel like my posture is better and my back is stronger.
- ramblerman 15y agoIs that third cartoon doing a boogy?
- proponentia 15y agoExplanationless science always gets into difficulties. That said, I suspect that watching TV all day everyday would kill a person, eventually, because thinking without a break depletes the CNS of resources which would otherwise be used to regulate the body. (Note: TV watching is a kind of externally driven thinking. More draining than thinking about the show would be the guilt thoughts caused by watching TV all day given that our culture believes (a) that watching too much TV is bad, and (b) that productive work is good.) However, it's misleading to claim that sitting around all day is unhealthy. For instance, you won't get a heart attack if you are a Buddhist Monk sitting in meditation. Also, moving around all day would kill people, eventually, by similar means and for similar reasons to TV watching. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518
- minsight 15y ago"For instance, you won't get a heart attack if you are a Buddhist Monk sitting in meditation." There's a claim that I won't buy without some sort of a citation.
- hugh3 15y agoI googled "died while meditating" and found this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luang_Pho_Daeng http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luang_Pho_Daeng who not only died while meditating in a lotus position, but supposedly failed to decompose afterwards. (I don't know whether it was a heart attack though...)
- samtp 15y agoYou should know that Dr. Blair is basically the world expert in healthy habits and physical activity. He is cited in medical journals over 2000 times every year. This is not explanationless science, but science backed by 20 years of rigorous research.
- benihana 15y ago>Those who were sitting more were substantially more likely to die That has to be the stupidest quote I've ever read. Are you telling me that if I sit less often, I'll be less likely to die?
- forgottenpaswrd 15y agoAm I the only one in hacker news that does not sit down at all at work? We are bipeds designed for standing on our two foot and moving from a while. I have lifeguards friends that talked to me about the change in the body shape they have seen over the years, especially women as the spend more and more time sit down in front of the computer. So I decided to change, it took months to get used to it as all musculature had been trained by years to sit down as since school time and on kids-adults are forced to sit down. I had worked as a teacher for kids and is really really interesting HOW THEY OPPOSE AND RESIST sitting in the same place without moving. One day we had strong hail storm out there and the principal-director forced us to keep kids inside on playtime. Other teachers forced kids to sit on their chairs so they could count and control them easily. The next class I had the kids almost exploding under their desk with painful anxiety. So I let them stand up and move as they wish while I was giving my class!!. It worked wonderfully. If I sit I use a Bar Stool, but I'm standing up 90% of the time. My computer is in front of my eyes. I love it. If you try it, CAUTION, it will take time for your musculature to adapt, at least a month.
- efsavage 15y agoWell, we're really designed to walk/run. Sitting at a bar school or standing still all day comes with its own set of health issues (not saying if they're equal or not, but they're present).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hugh3 15y agoLots of folks stand up all day for work. They tend to complain about their feet hurting. We're obviously designed for some kind of sitting. Our bodies bend very comfortably that way. If you walk uphill for ten miles, your body really wants to sit down on the nearest log or rock to take a rest (though how this was supposed to be comfortable back when we used to be naked is a mystery to me). I have no doubt that our ancestors used to sit down to rest. Probably to eat, and to drink water, and to talk, and to weave those loincloths which would be necessary to make sitting down on a log much less uncomfortable. Our backs and feet suck for standing all day. Mind you, our backs and feet suck for pretty much everything.
- postfuturist 15y agoThis sort of 'science writing' is infuriating: "Specifically, he found that men who reported more than 23 hours a week of sedentary activity had a 64 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than those who reported less than 11 hours a week of sedentary activity. And many of these men routinely exercised." Well, is he controlling for those who exercise or not? If not, then what is the point?
- nostromo 15y agoWell, at least NPR links to the studies they are citing -- so if you really want to dig in to the details, they are right there for you.
- bsgreenb 15y agoEven controlling for exercize wouldn't save this study.. Genetic and environmental factors will correlate with a sit-down lifestyle, confounding any possible conclusions. You could rule out genetic and family environment factors by comparing identical twins who have different sitting habits. My bet is that a big chunk, if not all, of the effect here could be explained by that. For the remaining "effect", you'd still have the issue of non-family environmental collinearity, though. Maybe you could find a job where people were randomly assigned to sitting vs. standing tasks. That'd be a nifty little natural experiment
- orofino 15y agoCouldn't the same be said of most medical findings? Should we verify all findings utilizing fully controlled testing on twins?
- bsgreenb 15y agoA twin study is just one form of (natural) experiment. It's common in medicine/epidemiology to perform double-blind trials with placebos, etc. Good medical research utilizes experiments rather than assuming causation from correlation like this study does. I am a big fan of twin studies, though (my background is in behavior genetics). Take the example of smoking. The most solid demonstration that smoking was bad for your health (aside from maybe the experiments on other mammals) was comparison of twins where one twin smoked and the other didn't.
- jaysonelliot 15y agoI'm lucky, I have a shelf in my office that happens to be perfect standing height for me. I decided to put my laptop on the shelf when I came in this morning, and give it a try. My office: http://yfrog.com/h7m5ajhyj http://yfrog.com/h7m5ajhyj So far today, I've gotten far more done than a normal Monday morning, and my energy level is way up. This could be good.
- city41 15y agoI'm two weeks into my standing desk experiment. If you stick with it, you're in for some discomfort. My legs adjusted quickly, the bottoms of my feet are still toughening up. The problem is my current standing desk only allows standing. I'm 100% committed to standing if I am working. That's fine 95% of the time, but there is that 5% (like after I've worked out for the day or already put in 10+ hours of standing but found I need to get some emergency/last minute stuff done) where I really do not want to stand. After two weeks I feel like my conclusion is the ideal desk is one that can easily adjust between standing and sitting, but stand most of the time.
- georgieporgie 15y agoHow about a standing desk with a taller chair for the times when you need to rest your lower half?
- nzadrozny 15y agoI love my stand-up desk, which I hacked together from an Ikea Galant: http://flic.kr/p/9kYneT http://flic.kr/p/9kYneT Total cost: around $200.
- a5seo 15y agoI've started using the Pomadoro technique, 30 mins focused work and 5 mins of "break" (there's more to it, but that's the gist). I'm going to make a real effort to use those 5 minutes to walk around and do something instead of look at lolcats from now on...
- Someone 15y agoI think varicose veins are evidence that standing up all day isn't what we were evolved for. Looking at chimps, gorillas, orang utan seems to conform that. In my limited knowledge, those species spend hours sitting or lying down. => I would guess it is not the sitting, but the sitting for long stretches in the same posture that is the problem.
- oconnor0 15y agoInteresting. What research is there on people standing all day getting varicose veins and the negatives of that versus sitting all day and the negatives of that?
- cormullion 15y agoPlenty of anti-standing information here: http://www.hazards.org/standing/index.htm http://www.hazards.org/standing/index.htm
- singular 15y agoI don't mean to sound facetious, but aren't we designed to also sit as well as stand/walk/run? That's what the buttocks have evolved for, after all:- "Physiologically, the buttocks enable weight to be taken off the feet while sitting" [1] Of course, having said that, we probably weren't designed for the amount of sitting a typical officer worker does, and certainly weren't designed for being sedentary. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttocks
- singular 15y agoWell, not surprising that was down-voted, but seriously - if somebody contends that we're 'not designed for X', yet we have actually evolved to be able to do X, I think it's reasonable to point that out, even if the fact is that we do too much sitting down.
- shpxnvz 15y agoWhile it may in fact be true that we evolved to able to sit, the sentence you quoted is in no way evidence of it. A link to supporting evidence, or even a well reasoned argument, would go along way towards backing up your claim.
- singular 15y agoIt was indeed an (uncited) quote from a wikipedia article which is hardly the same as concrete evidence :-) Regardless, it is certainly the case that we have evolved to be able to sit comfortably and take weight off our legs - that, I think, is indisputable. I would argue that the buttocks provide a structural base for the weight of the body which would otherwise be transmitted through the upper parts of the legs more so than they are in reality. That is something of a guess, however.
- teyc 15y agoStanding all day in a single spot can be pretty tiring too. A footstool can help a little, but it is probably best to have a mix of postures.
- yewweitan 15y agoShameless Plug for a piece that I wrote that talks about some of these issues and more importantly, their practical resolution. 'Should I get a Standing Desk?' - http://www.yewhealth.com/2011/04/03/should-i-get-a-standing-desk/ http://www.yewhealth.com/2011/04/03/should-i-get-a-standing-...