Yes, I know the title of my post today is a little ambiguous, but I assure you that it will all be clarified very shortly as to what it means. Over the past week in my daily meanderings through the digital NYTimes, I have seen an article repeatedly appear in one of the columns on their main page. The title of the article is "Get up. Get out. Don't Sit" by Gretchen Reynolds. If your guessing that the main brunt of the article was about sitting and exercise, then you are correct, but not in the way that you might normally think about sitting and exercise. Most of us know (I would hope that all of us would know) that we don't get the exercise we need while sitting. Many people who have office jobs probably sit for extended periods of time without getting up and probably find it hard to fit in the amount of exercise needed. Yet, the article doesn't necessarily deal with exercise per se. The only issue the article really deals with is sitting and how much sitting we actually do. So enough pandering around the issue at hand and time to get down to it. The main message of the article, based on scientific studies, is that the more we sit, the shorter our life will be. Is this even possible? According to some scientists, it is. The main study that the article uses as its basis was done in Australia that tracks the health of 12,000 Australians. One of the questions that is asked on a regular basis in the survey is "how much TV do you watch on a daily basis". As the article states, watching TV is not necessarily hazardous, however it is a fairly good indicator of how much sitting people actually do. After accounting for various other health issues and using tables and equations to single out the effect of sitting on the participants, the scientists found that for every hour we sit, we lose approximately 21.8 minutes of our life. Depending on how much TV we watch, that can add up pretty quickly. Lets just figure that the average person watches about 2 hours of TV a day. That two hours equals 43.6 minutes off the end of your life. In a week, that would be 5 hours subtracted from your life. It still doesn't seem to bad. However, carry that out for a year and you lose about 265 hours or 11 days off your life. What I'm getting at is that it all adds up.
How can sitting watching TV be so bad for our health? It isn't just the TV that does it, it is overall amount of sitting we do. Regardless of whether we are at work or at home, sitting diminishes the overall time we have on this earth. Also according the article, the average adult spends 50-70% of their time seated. That doesn't make our prospects at a longer life look that good. The scary part is that even if a person regularly exercises, the sitting will still shorter his or her life. The true reason as to why this occurs is still being hashed out in laboratories but it appears one of the main reasons this holds true is that while sitting, we don't contract the major muscles in our body. When we don't use the muscles in our body, they use less energy and the surplus accumulates, breaks down into sugars, and could lead to a variety of other health risks as well as shortening one's life. So how do I feel about all this? Frankly, I find it interesting, but at the same time, its not something I am going to overly worry about. I am not going to worry about it for a couple of reasons, the first being that I don't really sit that much during the day. If I had to calculate my time sitting, I would have to say it is around 5-6 hours a day. Now that is not solely TV time. That time for me includes sitting in traffic, sitting for meals, and also watching a little TV in the evening. I don't really feel too bad about that number. Yes it may shorten my life by a few years in the end, but so could walking by a coal fired power plant while getting my daily exercise (I don't have a coal fired power plant near me, just an example). The second reason, as you may have guessed, is that there are too many other things out there that could shorten my life for me to worry about sitting. I guess if I sat more during the day I would have cause to be concerned, but I don't. Part of me feels that there is sometimes too much for us to worry about when it comes to our health. Granted, there are plenty of harmful things that could shorten our lives, but at what point does it become too much. Overall, humans are living longer than ever before, and yet we have this overt concern with increasing the length of our life and beating out the person next to us. For what? It seems that the longer we live, the more problems we have with our health. There are those in their 90's who are in excellent condition, don't get me wrong, but a majority of people in their 90's are plagued with health issues and often times need assistance. So why be concerned with a few years off the end of our life?
When looking at life expectancy of either ourselves or someone else, the main factor that we must consider is that we never know how long we will live. We could live either a few more days or a few more decades, we just don't know. When you take into account the effect that sitting has along with all the other detrimental things we can do to diminish our health, then maybe there is cause to be concerned. If a person smokes, drinks excessively, works in a coal mine, and sits for extended periods of times, then maybe they should cut something out to extend their life. Sitting is one of the easiest actions to reverse. Even in the work place, people can choose to take a few extra walks around the block of cubicles or make an extra trip to the water cooler or copier. If it really comes down to it and we find we can't live without TV, we could always set up an exercise bike or a treadmill in front of our TV and exercise while watching. There are ways to combat the horrible action of sitting, so don't get too worried about shortening your life. Who knows what study will come out next showing another action or non-action that will shorten our lives. I sure don't. For now, though, I should probably stop writing as I am sitting while doing so and go run a few laps around my house for good measure. (Trust me, I will be doing no running around my house, just saying). Anyway, watch how much you sit or you could be sitting your way to a shorter life.
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