Wednesday, October 17, 2012

More Sobering Crap About Sitting

We all keep seeing reports about the dangers of sitting (and clearly, I can't stop blogging about it), but everyone keeps their butt cheeks glued to the couch anyway. According to this new article in the New York Times, most of us spend "50 to 70 percent" of our lives sitting -- mostly at work or in front of our television sets.


Is TV really that good? Perhaps. I, for one, have spent many an hour planted in front of the boob tube, gazing slack-jawed at the glowing images on the screen. But check this out:
Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes. By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the authors [of an Australian research study] said. 
Looking more broadly, they concluded that an adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV.
Those results hold true, the authors point out, even for people who exercise regularly. It appears, Dr. Veerman says, that “a person who does a lot of exercise but watches six hours of TV” every night “might have a similar mortality risk as someone who does not exercise and watches no TV.”
Guess I'll have to catch up on episodes of The Walking Dead while standing up.