Warning: Your chair may be dangerous to your health

I have a very strange looking chair in my office. It attracts many, including myself, to take shelter in it, when I want some temporary peace and concentration. It is so “nurturing” that you can stay in it for hours. But what if that chair, or any chair I sit on for hours, is really killing me?

Doing a science column weekly for over a dozen years now, studies I come across naturally fall into my own mental categories and one worrying category that naturally surfaces is “common things that could kill you”. Under that are things that could kill you slowly like pesticides that accumulate in the things we eat, metals that are in fish that we eat, poison in the air we breathe. But it seems that now, I would have to add “chairs” to this modern army of “soft killers.”

In 2010, researchers studied over 120,000 individuals who had no history of high-risk diseases like cancer, heart illnesses or diabetes. They tracked their health over a 13-year period to find out the effect of the hours spent sitting on mortality. The findings revealed that indeed, even if you exercised regularly, sitting for long hours could cancel the benefits of your work-out sessions. Furthermore, women were even more likely than men to die if they sat for more than 6 hours a day.

That study even showed that those results already took into account the hours of exercise that the subjects reported.  For those who did not exercise, the association between hours of sitting and death was even stronger.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times carried an article about a book by Dr. James Levine, the medical scientist who is one of those who think evidence is mounting that we are sitting our way towards our own death. He was quoted in the article to say that we lose two hours of our life for every hour we sit.

The article pointed out that this may be something that has to do with how much time you spend moving other than for exercise or sports. This is referred to as non-exercise thermogenesis (NEAT). This means that if your job involves a lot of active physical movement, you most likely spend less hours sitting and therefore have a high NEAT.

Early last year, Popular Science published a list of 7 reasons why sitting could kill you, ranging from kidney disease to heart disease.  Reading the list could make you now think twice before taking a seat or even consider getting a cocktail table for a work desk.

This is why when a study was published revealing what an MRI scan of a healthy lady’s butt last month, it was not as funny to me as it should be. The study wanted to characterize the muscular and fat reaction of the woman’s derriere to sitting. It revealed what any woman, especially middle-aged ones like me who care a lot less, already know – that the part flattens like an uneven “monay” at least temporarily. The study did not mention anything about existing studies on the slow but serious risks associated with sitting. Maybe that study could be revisited to see what is it about the muscular response to sitting that seems to affect so many systems in our over-all health.  

It is easy to see why this is particularly worrying for me. I am mainly a writer spends a great portion of my productive (at least to me) hours either dreaming up stuff or sitting and typing away.  But I am now worried enough to consider getting a desk high enough to work on while I stand. Will let you know how far I can do this or until another study comes out on the deathly perils of standing too long. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books,Science Solitaire and Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire. Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.