SLO LIFE Winter 2010

To Your HealTH
Stuck at your desk?
Sit down - we’ve got some bad news for you.
Actually, you should probably stand up.
Some researchers in Sweden caused quite a stir
earlier this year when their paper was published
in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. In
essence, they said that, even if you exercise 30 to
60 minutes per day but spend much of the rest
of the day sitting, you may be at increased risk of
metabolic syndrome (diseases like diabetes) and
death.
While their conclusions are drawn from a small
but consistent pool of data, there appears to be
significant support for their findings here in the
States. James Levine, MD, an obesity specialist at
the Mayo Clinic said to Science Magazine back in
2005, “What fascinates me is that humans evolved
over 1.5 million years entirely on the ability to
walk and move. And literally 150 years ago, 90%
of human endeavor was still agricultural. In a tiny
speck of time we’ve become chair-sentenced.”
Dr. Levine has since become somewhat of a guru
for the “treadmill desk” and made the first live
demonstration on “Good Morning America” in
2007 [we link to the video on our website, which is
worth the five minutes it takes to watch it].
And we didn’t have to travel far from San Luis
Obispo to find someone that agreed with him.
“Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much
worse than a standard office chair,” says Galen
Cranz, a professor at the University of California
at Berkeley. She goes on to give a useful visual
comparing the spine to an “S” shape when standing
and a “C” shape when sitting, and explains how the
“S” is much stronger than the “C” and so on. She
asserts that “the spine was not meant to stay for
recommended reading:
-The New York Times, February 23, 2010
long periods in a seated position.”
On the surface, these arguments seem to make a
lot of sense, but you have to dig deeper to really
understand how it all works. For that we picked up
on the research of Marc Hamilton, a microbiologist
at the University of Missouri, who concurs with the
Swedes when he says “sitting too much is not the
same as exercising too little. They do completely
different things to the body.” Hamilton, like many
of the researchers we found who study the effects
of sitting, does not own an office chair. He claims
that “when you sit, the muscles are relaxed and
enzyme activity, which breaks down fats, drops
by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to camp out in the
bloodstream. Within a couple hours of sitting,
healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%.”
Although the ideal situation would be to just not
sit as much, for many of us - particularly during
the work day at the office - that may not be a
realistic possibility. A decent alternative appears
to be what researchers call “perching” which
means half-standing, half-sitting on a barstool at a
height that keeps the weight on the legs and leaves
the S-shaped curve intact. In a traditional office
environment where you are sitting at a computer,
this means that you would have to elevate your
desk.
While we find this subject matter quite compelling,
frankly we are getting a little “freaked out” by
the length of time we are sitting at our desks
researching it. There is a lot of great information
that we link to on our website, but, for now, we’re
going for a walk! SLO LIFE
“
It doesn’t matter if you go running
every morning, or you’re a regular at
the gym. If you spend most of the rest
of the day sitting — in your car, your
office chair, on your sofa at home — you
are putting yourself at increased risk
of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a
variety of cancers and an early death.
In other words, irrespective of whether
you exercise vigorously, sitting for long
periods is bad for you.
”
Have a health question? Go to slolifemagazine.com and share your curiosity with us.
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