Why Sitting Is Bad For You
I hope you’re sitting down for this.
Actually, that’s the problem…
All that sitting you’re doing throughout the day is fucking killing you!
In well-documented research, people who sit or do any form of sedentary behavior in a reclining or lying posture for hours have a greater risk of dying from premature death than those who are more active. Not only that but prolonged sitting also increases the risk of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and several forms of cancer, such as breast and colon. That spells trouble for U.S. adults, most of whom spend more than 9 hours per day sitting.
The advent of technology is mostly at fault for the increase in occupational and leisure-time sitting, as there’s less need to move from threats or having to hunt or work the land for food like our ancestors did, for example. It’s for this reason that even though it’s not known why sitting poses such a danger, one hypothesis is that it may have to do with evolution and the human body being designed for activity and shutting down to conserve energy when it’s not doing what it was made for. The theory follows that those mechanisms for reducing energy expenditure in the absence of movement to keep us alive when energy sources were scarce have since adapted and now manifest as disease from the slowing down of vital processes that would otherwise continue operating at full capacity and maintain health with regular activity. That’s just a guess.
Whatever the reason for why sitting is so bad, it’s a public health concern and contributes to the $117B in annual healthcare costs that’s associated with physical inactivity.
So what’s there to do about it?
The obvious is to not sit down as much and move more!
As well-meaning as that oft-given advice is, however, it’s practically useless because it doesn’t provide any specific instruction for how often you should get up and for how long, especially during a workday when you’re stuck seated.
So what’s the answer?
According to current research, an “exercise snack” of five minutes of walking for every 30 minutes of sitting is the least amount of activity needed to even out some of the negative effects of sitting for prolonged periods.1That comes out to 1 hour and 20 minutes of walking per day if working the standard 8-hour workday. That’s based on the findings of a study by exercise physiologists at Columbia University.
In the study, 11 healthy middle-aged and older adults were asked to sit in an ergonomic chair and read, work on their laptop, or use their phone in a lab for 8 hours on five separate days. On each of those five days, the participants had to walk on a treadmill at a light intensity for one minute after every 30 minutes of sitting; one minute after every 60 minutes; five minutes after every 30 minutes; five minutes after every 60 minutes; or no walking at all. Other than for bathroom breaks or to perform the scheduled activity, the participants weren’t allowed to get up from their chair.
All of the options that involved activity reduced blood pressure by 4 to 5 mmHg but the 5-minute walk every half hour was the only strategy that significantly lowered blood sugar levels.2During the experiment, the participants’ mood, fatigue, and cognitive performance were also measured. All walking regimens were found to improve levels of mood and fatigue but no boost was made in cognition. It’s from this difference that the conclusion was reached that five minutes of walking for every 30 minutes of sitting is advisable because of its effect on two important risk factors for heart disease.
If, however, you don’t want to get up every half hour or can’t because you have a job that doesn’t allow for it, such as driving a bus or semi-trailer, then another study provides some additional instruction. Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the health and activity tracker data of 11,989 people from Norway, Sweden, and the U.S. were observed by a team of Norwegian scientists. Over the course of the 16-year cohort study, it was revealed that the mortality risk from prolonged sitting was heightened in individuals who got less than 22 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per day. That risk of early death was completely eliminated, however, in individuals who engaged in 22 minutes or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity irrespective of their accumulated sedentary time. A similar conclusion was reached by Taiwanese researchers in a separate cohort study. In their group of 481,688 individuals who were followed up after almost 13 years, it was discovered that 15 to 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per day was what was needed to bring down the risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease and all causes to the same level of risk as individuals who don’t spend a lot of time sitting.
Prolonged sitting is now a normal part of modern life but it has deleterious effects that have been demonstrated in the scientific literature. In fact, because of the health outcomes of sitting, it’s been compared to smoking, with some going so far as to say that smoking is healthier than sitting. Studies, such as one in the American Journal of Public Health, fall short of supporting that claim, however.
Whatever the case, sitting for large chunks of the day is bad for you and should be avoided. To mitigate some, if not all, of the harms of sitting, it appears that walking 5 minutes for every 30 minutes of sitting or exercising more than 22 minutes per day at a moderate or vigorous intensity is enough. Those are the current recommendations based on the available research at the moment but it should be noted that they’re subject to change because the treatment and prevention of the effects of sitting is an ongoing field of research and more work is underway to evaluate the health outcomes of different doses of activity on a wider range of people.
Glossary: exercise, intensity, treadmill
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