Sitting too Much Every-day is not Good for you

Source: Dr. Art Hister http://drarthister.blogspot.ca/2012/03/sitting-too-much-every-day-is-not-good.html

A 3-year-long study that followed over 200,000 Australian adults concluded that the longer you sit every day, the higher your risk of premature death.

So people who sat the most and who did no exercise were 3 times more likely to die over these 3 years than their more active, less sedentary peers.

But here’s the rub: the data also revealed that anyone sitting between 8-11 hours a day had a 15 % higher risk of dying than people who sat less than 8 hours a day, and this held true even if the longer sitters were doing regular exercise outside their sedentary time.

Even worse, people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40 % higher risk of overall death.

Seems to me that a study like this has several major cautions especially the fact that people who sit longer hours are very likely more sick to begin with than people who don’t sit as much and it’s their poorer health that is actually the reason for their higher risk of premature death, and I know that the researchers try to account for a factor like this but in short-term studies like this, it seems to me impossible to account for this potential mitigating determinant.

That said, sitting too much can’t possibly be good for anyone so if you have a sedentary job, you should probably try especially hard to maximize the time you spend doing more active stuff away from work.