Reading This Post Will Kill You
Here's the bad news: Working at a sedentary can damage your health.
Here's the worse news: Getting a bit of exercise into your daily regimen may not offset the damage that comes from sitting at your desks all day.
An upcoming review in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine offers the first systematic review of the existing scientific literature investigating links between occupational sitting and body mass index, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mortality. And what they found was not encouraging.
In the U.S., people spend an average of 9.2 hours working during the week - often in jobs which require a lot of sitting. Then they go home and spend an average of just over 2 hours every day day watching TV and playing (computer) games, The paper warns that for some, this increasingly sedentary lifestyle may affect how long they live.
"There is emerging animal and human evidence for biological plausibility of an association between sitting and health risks," according to the researchers who examined 43 scientific studies on the topic. "The chronic, unbroken periods of muscular unloading associated with prolonged sitting time may have deleterious biological consequences."
On a related note, the researchers concluded that prolonged sitting may lead to more snacking, which, in turn, "is likely to contribute to a positive daily energy balance and poor metabolic outcomes." (A polite way of saying that you'll get fat.)
While the authors said they still await future studies that more closely track the effects of leisure-time sitting and physical activity, they noted that four of the six studies they reviewed pointed to a higher risk of death for sedentary workers. Also, three of four studies they looked over pointed to connections between occupational sitting and a greater risk of contracting diabetes.
Because of some disagreements in the existing research on the topic, the study authors offered restrained judgments about the negative causal relationships between sedentary work and higher health risks. At the same time, though, they said there was "only limited evidence in support of a positive relationship between occupational sitting and health risks."
In an interview with the Health Behavior News Service, study co-author Jannique van Uffelen, noted that "sitting at work could affect health and for some people, current levels of leisure time physical activity may not be enough to offset these effects."
One counter-intuitive finding: Van Uffelen and her colleagues had expected to find a more pronounced link between sitting and obesity rates. But she said that just half of the cross-sectional studies found inactive workers with higher body mass indexes. How to explain the disconnect? Van Uffelen suggested that heavier people just sit more.