Sitting Is as Bad for You as Smoking
Dr. Michael Jensen, from the Mayo Clinic, told KDKA Radio that the average worker “spends over five hours and 40 minutes sitting at their job every day and a new study says it’s bad for your health, with some claiming the long-term effects of sitting can be as bad as smoking.”
To find out whether the test subjects in the study were sitting or not, Dr. Jensen says one of his colleagues, Dr. James Levine, invented underwear that can “tell whether you’re sitting, standing, or lying down essentially every half second of the day.”
With the data they gathered and studied, they came to the conclusion that people need to move around more. Dr. Jensen says they found, “that people who are overweight tend to spend a lot more time sitting then people who have not gained weight.”
Interestingly, a trip to the gym for 30 minutes or an hour may not be enough to combat all the time spent sitting. According to Dr. Jensen, “sitting is independently associated with greater risk of dying of heart disease [and] diabetes, even when you try to account for exercise.”
Runner’s World: “There’s no running away from it: The more you sit, the poorer your health and the earlier you may die, no matter how fit you are.”