Sitting Too Much Is Dangerous

If your work involves sitting the whole day in front of the computer, then you need to know that there is a warning from health experts about sitting too much: it is dangerous to your health. What is alarming is that even if you exercise regularly, the effects of sitting too much everyday can still be very bad for your health. The exercise you do in the morning before you go to work will not help in lessening the bad effects of sitting too much the whole day.

We all know that people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to become fat and susceptible heart attack, but that is just one part of it, there is more to prolonged sitting than just becoming fat. Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences says that “after four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals and the genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down.” A study in Canada that was published last year revealed that people who spend most of their time siting have a higher death risk whether or not they exercised regularly.

Now that we know that sitting too much could be deadly, what can we do to counteract it? Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge has this advice: “We don’t have enough evidence yet to say how much sitting is bad, but it seems the more you can get up and interrupt this sedentary behavior, the better.” Ekblom-Bak has similar advice; she says, “People should keep exercising because that has a lot of benefits, but when they’re in the office, they should try to interrupt sitting as often as possible, don’t just send your colleague an e-mail. Walk over and talk to him. Standing up.”