Pre-Ramble: Well, if you’re sitting at your computer reading this blog, you’re probably going to want to read real fast and then get up and take a lap …

This just in: Health experts warn that “sitting is deadly.”

That’s right. Sitting. Sitting in your office, … in the car, … on the couch, … at the movies, … on the porch, … at the dinner table … wherever…

Apparently, it doesn’t matter where the sitting takes place, it’s all about the overall number of hours spent in a seated position.  According to an article in this week’s British Journal of Sports Medicine,

After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals … genes that regulate the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down … Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest that people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die.”

Get up, lard butt. I always feel antsy when I have to sit in a meeting for longer than 45 minutes, … I can practically feel the blood pooling in my ankles and the few traces of muscle fiber left in my big old fanny breaking down, but I always thought that was just me being impatient or squirrely. Now I know that it’s actually the genes in my backside degenerating. 

It’s clear that there needs to be a whole lot more research and some useful metrics on this scenario. For example, are these researchers telling me that a marathon-runner sitting on the beach in a lounge chair is in greater danger than, say, a truck driver standing at the bar eating a double cheese-steak?  When does the “generally-accepted-as-healthy-sitting-down-person” trump the “generally-accepted-as-unhealthy-standing-up-person”?  I need to see a graph. 

Well and then …  Have you ever wondered if articles that appear side-by-side in the newspaper ever read each other?  I’m pretty sure they don’t, or else a researcher from the ”Sitting is deadly“ article would totally have called the researcher from the adjacent, “Young people are getting more screen time than ever” article to sound the alarm.

This doesn’t sit well …  A ten-year-long study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation on 2,000 young people between the ages of 8 and 18 confirms that youth are now spending more hours on the computer, in front of a television, playing video games, texting and listening to music than an adult spends full-time at work — more than 53 hours per week. The study goes on to report a positive correlation between kids who spent the most time in front of electronic media and earning poor grades, getting into trouble and reporting that they are “often sad.”

With the exception of the Wii, an entire generation of kids - millions and millions of them – will have been sitting on their failing sorry asses in front of a screen for the better part of their lives. The public health ramifications could be daunting; the personal health ramifications, even more so.

The Take-Away: For gosh sake, GET UP AND MOVE AROUND! 

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