That desk job is killing you

No, quite literally. Turns out that the office chair and your comfy couch when you get home from work to unwind are conspiring to turn you into a fat and unhealthy blob destined for an early death.

Credit goes to James over at The Four Part Land for tracking this one down.

Here are a couple excerpts:

"If you're reading this article sitting down—the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day—stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they're not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you're doing—sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn't offset it. "People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

......

Older people who move around have half the mortality rate of their peers. Frequent TV and Web surfers (sitters) have higher rates of hypertension, obesity, high blood triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and high blood sugar, regardless of weight. Lean people, on average, stand for two hours longer than their counterparts."

Check out the whole article here, well worth the read:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177071221162.htm

Honestly - it just makes sense. The more research we do, the more we find out that what is good for us, eating natural fats, running barefoot, standing up, is what humans did for tens of thousands of years before the advent of the modern world around the time of your great-great-granddad.