Think about how much of your daily time is spent sitting ... scary, huh? Now give Kate Linau's analytic article some meditative time and journey with her into what she's learned about our major (in)activity, on our rear ends, sitting ...
-- Albert Gedraitis
Maclean's.ca (Jan20,2k13)
Sitting can ill you
It’s tied to obesity, diabetes and cancer–and exercise won’t make up for it
by
Kate Lunau on Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:36pm -
On Sept. 24, 2007, a Monday evening, Cathleen Renner sat down in her home office to tackle a project. Renner, 47, was a manager at AT&T, where she’d been for 25 years. It isn’t clear how many hours she spent at the computer that night, making a plan for a possible employee strike, but she did send an email to a colleague at 12:26 a.m. When her son got up at 7 a.m., she was at her desk. Renner took him to the bus a little later, and as she walked out the door, she clutched her leg and let out a cry of pain. Still, she returned to work. At 11:34, she called an ambulance. Renner was dead by the time she reached the hospital.
Like most of us, Renner spent long hours on the job seated at her computer; in a workers’ compensation claim filed after her death, her husband argued that sitting was what killed her. (Renner died of a pulmonary embolism after a blood clot formed in her leg.) The case was not exactly straightforward; AT&T called an expert who pointed out Renner was morbidly obese, weighing 304 lb., and had recently started taking new medication, birth control pills. But in 2011 a New Jersey judge ruled in James Renner’s favour, noting his wife’s job required her to “spend unusually long hours at her computer” and awarding him workers’ compensation benefits as a result. The decision was extremely unusual, the first of its kind legal observers could recall. But if a growing number of health experts are right about the dangers of sitting, it could be a harbinger of things to come.
Like obesity or smoking before it, sitting is the new plague, and not just because it can lead to deadly blood clots. Alarmingly, the latest research links it to obesity, diabetes and the major killers, heart disease and cancer. And exercising the recommended half-hour a day, while beneficial, isn’t enough to stave off the ill effects of sitting. “Thirty minutes is two per cent of your day,” says Mark Tremblay, director of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group (HALO) at the CHEO Research Institute in Ottawa. “What about the other 98 per cent?”
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