Stand Up: Your Life Could Depend On It
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — Standing up more often may reduce your chances of dying within three years, even if you are already physically active, a study of more than 200,000 people published in Archives of Internal Medicine shows. The study found that adults who sat 11 or more hours per day had a 40% increased risk of dying in the next three years compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day. This was after taking into account their physical activity, weight and health status.
9 comments:
Do you know if it took into account their age? I've seen news reports of this today but not been able to pull up the article. I saw no mention of accounting for anything other than health, weight and activity in any report, except fro naming the larger study. Does "45 and up" mean they just started this study and will be following current 45 year-olds into old age or are the people being studied spread out in the "45 and up" group?
"adults who sat 11 or more hours per day had a 40% increased risk ... compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day"
I don't get it: "compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day"? Really? Let's see: assuming (since I couldn't get the original article either), that "sitting" doesn't include the 7 hours or so of sleeping, that leaves you with with 17 hours a day or so to sit or stand (or walk or whatever); so are they telling us that there are people out there who spend 13 hours (or more!) of those 17 hours - EVERY DAY - standing?
Even if a person like that works 8 hours every day and doesn't sit down even for a single minute - it still leaves at least 5 hours of standing! So his day would look something like this: 7 hours sleep (horizontally), 4 hours sitting, 8 hours standing at work and 5 hours standing at home - and all that on a daily basis, weekends and holidays included - not bad if you can pull it off...
And all that 13 to 17 hours of standing a day buys you is a 29% decrease (do the math) of the risk of dying in the next 3 years compared to those who stand 0 to 6 hours day. I must be missing something.
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Standing at my Geek desk while reading this. Somewhat gratifying...
is this ANOTHER of those bloody epidemiological studies, in which much is claimed to be "associated"...?
That's why I invented the Solution! Two birds, one stone.
Anonymous, seems to me you've picked out a real math incongruity and it gets even worse if you figure that the average adult drives 1.5hrs a day (to/from work, chores, kids activities). I do think moving around during the day is good for us, but supporting that with supposed mortality benefits to mythical people that only sit for 4hrs a day is bizarre. They'd be sitting only 2.5hrs outside of the car. Meaning they rarely sit down apart from eating and going to the bathroom? The perils of relying on self-reporting....
Epidemiology is very close to being a pseudoscience.
Hmmm They'd be sitting only 2.5hrs outside of the car....
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