Overcome the health harm from sitting too much....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-22-2010

Last Wednesday, 1-20-2010, there was a health news story on the AP online news that had results of a study showing that sitting too much causes health harm; and, according to this study, regular exercise was insufficient to overcome this health harm completely.

Further, it looks like virtually everyone today sits too much, well over 4 hours a day, & that doing so tends to cause type 2 diabetes, obesity, & heart disease. That much sitting also tends to increase the death rate & shorten people’s lives. This last point explains AP’s headline on the story.:

“Experts: Sitting too much could be deadly” was AP’s title.

It seems it matters not why you are sitting, the harm is from going over a certain number of total hours for any reason per day or per week.

In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences said that the genes which regulate the usage of glucose and fats begin to malfunction after 4 hours of continuous sitting.

(In a related study, Jean Mayer, PhD found that below a certain level of physical activity, about half an hour a day of moderate exercise, people were hungry for MORE calories than they were burning up while above that level they only got hungrier if they used and needed more and their appetite matched what they actually were using.)

In a separate study in Canada, also noted in the AP article, it was found that people who sat more had a higher death risk, whether or not they exercised.

The story also quoted statistics showing that most people sit half their waking hours. So, if you sleep 6 or 7, which is close to average today, most people including me and thee, sit for 8 & a half to 9 hours a day or more.

Worse, if the average person watches TV 30 hours a week, which is about what I’ve seen quoted, this is particularly harmful since you burn fewer calories while watching TV than you do when you are asleep. Needless to say this also means that your circulation is very low, your muscles and motor nerves are not getting any action when this happens. This suggests that most of us get over 4 hours a day of this kind of sitting which is most likely to be harmful to our health.

Similarly, a recent story found that teens while sitting while using some form of media (from texting to video games, to watching TV, to email & using the internet on a computer) now average over 8 hours sitting a day by just while using some kind of media.

So, it’s simple. Virtually everyone sits too much now for good health.

But surely there must be something that can be done to overcome the health harm from this.

Here are seven things you can do that I think will work. Five you can try as soon as this afternoon while two you may have to work a bit for several days or longer to set up.

Some you may like and find easy and some you may not. Do what you can!

1. Drink multiple cups of tea or green tea or clean water or vegetable juice each day. (More than 3 cups of coffee will disrupt your sleep; but it takes far more tea or green tea to do this.)

If you do this, every so often, you’ll need to get up take a bathroom break. That provides regular breaks in your sitting each day.

(Note that soft drinks, both regular & diet, tend to make the health harms of sitting greater and so are NOT a good idea for this use.)

You can even prime the pump a bit extra by getting a drink of water right after you get out of the bathroom.

2. Part of the health harm from sitting may well come from NOT going outside and getting enough vitamin D from sunshine. We now know this causes everything from depression, to heart disease to autoimmune diseases to cancer to rickets & more.

You can overcome this in two ways.

You can take a daily walk outside each day for 20 minutes as part of your lunch hour. Surprisingly, this actually can give you a surprising amount of vitamin D even on an overcast & rainy or snowy winter day. (Your eyes adapt to the lower amount of light so it looks dim. But the actual amount of light measured by a meter is well over 10 times what it is inside even if it does NOT look that way.) Of course, this also can be part of your regular exercise to do this & has other health benefits from doing it.

And, it’s quite inexpensive to take enough vitamin D3 to overcome this part of the problem. We know that it takes at least 1700 iu a day of vitamin D to work. 400 to 800 will avoid the very worst deficiency states but little more than that we now know. The woman I posted on last time now takes 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 in the winter & 5,000 iu a day the rest of the year. That may be close to the ideal amount. It definitely is safe as I posted on yesterday.

3. In the same way that fat people who exercise have better health than sedentary thin people, things like regular strength training and interval cardio and regular walks and other regular moderate and vigorous exercise WILL largely offset the harm from sitting too much.

It may well be wise to do more than that if sitting too much is that harmful. But, the health records of the people who do regular exercise shows that it is somewhere between mandatory for good health & very highly recommended.

In short, if you sit much, you’re really asking for it if you don’t get regular exercise.

Harry Truman and a woman Venture Capitalist mentioned in Tina Seelig’s recent best seller, “What I wish I knew when I was twenty” both did as a matter of policy was to have many face to face conferences while going on a walk outside.

It looks like they were on the right track. (I presume the woman Venture Capitalist still does it.)

4. Virtually all the kinds of health problems they now think sitting too much causes are all also caused by drinking soft drinks and eating sugary or overly salty junk foods and packaged snacks and desserts and other commercial baked goods using mostly refined grains and harmful fats and oils.

So, if you eat and drink this way now, AND sit too much, you are getting a double dose of trouble!

So one cure is stop doing it!

Stop eating or drinking anything with high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy or refined grains and/or which has had tons of salt added to it. Stop ingesting that stuff; and paying the people who make and sell it now for making you fat & sick.

Instead, learn to eat vegetables and health OK fats and protein foods and some regular amounts of fresh fruit as well. Many kinds of traditional cuisine use spices to make such real food taste good. Some of the dishes are delicious in fact. Start finding out more of these ways of eating you like and learn to only eat that way.

Only eat sugary treat foods once a week or less if at all & only eat versions that leave out the most harmful ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy.

5. Find a way to get your TV watching to 10 hours a week or less most weeks. ONLY watch the shows you like best. Stop watching anything that’s OK but not great or just to pass the time. If you need someone to keep you company when you are alone and bored, listen to the radio while you do something active or phone friend. Sometimes exercise instead of watching TV. Use faster input media for most news stories than sitting passively watching TV. (Reading the stories that actually interest you on Yahoo is both dramatically faster than watching TV news and much more focused on your actual interests. Using weather.com, slow as it is to access sometimes, is faster than sitting through half an hour of local TV news to see the weather on TV.) Tape many shows & edit out the commercials to see more of what you want in less time.

6. It may well make sense to either get a timer that flashes a light in a color you find OK every 20 to 30 minutes & stand up, if only for a few seconds as soon as you can after the flashing starts every time.

Since this is quiet, it will not disrupt you if you are on the phone when it happens. And, you can continue writing or looking at the internet too. Simply continue without interruption but stand up while you continue.

7. The fix that I think makes the most sense is for a company that makes bicycles or exercise equipment now or a startup specializing in it to do is to make several versions of an under the desk or in front of the couch miniature exercise bike.

Then people can simply keep it going while they sit even if their pace it varies in speed and is rarely if ever done fast.

This will keep up their circulation and normal metabolism but can be done without distraction once you get used to it & without having to worry about getting sweaty -- as you might do if you were focusing on it and doing it as fast as you can.

I’ve not seen such a thing myself. But if one already exists, given this information, internet sales also would work and may happen soon!


Five of these 7 things you can literally begin within the next few days. If you want to stay healthy, I think you owe it to yourself to do your best to do all five of them.

Getting the kind of timer I describe or an under the desk mini-exercise bike style exerciser may take a bit longer.

But it looks like it may be important to add them when you can.