Maybe you shouldn’t be. The below chart was at Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, but I don’t know how accurate it is. It claims that long hours of sitting is deadly. Intuitively, this seems plausible.
The information—if it is information and not, in reality, a manufactured collection of factoids—comes from an advertising site called “MedicalBillingandCoding.org” (I know, it sounds fishy; probably not a good source for medical information.) Still, what’s being claimed is disturbing enough to pass along (in the event that it is even remotely accurate). And it does offer numerous references at the end, though I haven’t attempted to check them.
. . .
Scary! I hate working in an office all day long! : ( Our jobs are killing us lol!
That’s what the modern world is all about, providing comfort so we can ease into diabethes or heart disease. Eventually vice taxes and other such meassures will have to counter this trend. Most people can’t handle freedom.
I’m not sure what a 40% higher chance of death means. People die sitting down? Is that like people often dying in hospitals. What the cause and effect? Color me skeptical of this recently popular idea. As I sit down and earnestly expect to live the night.
I suppose if, say, one out of every 200 people in their 40s die each year, and you sit a lot, perhaps your odds of dying in any given year go from .o5% to .07%. That’s close to a 40% difference that a person might be willing to live with.
If, however, you’re 70 and discover that your odds of dying in any subsequent year are about 1 in 15, increasing those odds to 1.4 in 15 by sitting a lot might make you more nervous. You’ve suddenly gone from 1 in 15 to closer to 1 in 10.
—Santi