Where the shtender comes into its own…
from smh.com.au comes the following fascinating piece based on recent research-
Beware of the chair
March 4, 2010 – 9:05AM
The time has come for office chairs to come with a health warning and ”upholstered, height-adjustable weapons of mass destruction” might not be too much an exaggeration.
Sitting for prolonged periods – and, let’s face it, few places compete with the office when it comes to opportunities to park one’s behind – is now linked to increased risk of premature death, particularly from cardiovascular disease. It is also associated with increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cancer.
What’s more, these risks are not necessarily mitigated by those few hours a week you might spend running, swimming or pumping weights at the gym. That kind of exercise is still important, so don’t stop, but sitting for prolonged periods appears to be a health hazard itself, much as smoking is a health hazard even if you also happen to be a devoted jogger.
The science is scary and has prompted some bosses to re-think how they make their office staff work.
Some of the most recent findings come from an Australian study published in the journal Circulation in January. It found that for every hour that a person spends sitting in front of the television, their individual risk of death from all causes rose 11 per cent, their risk of death from cardiovascular disease rose 18 per cent and their risk of dying from cancer, 9 per cent.
Professor David Dunstan, of Melbourne’s Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute and the paper’s lead author, is keen to emphasise that the research is not about TV watching per se but about sitting, wherever it might be. ”Television viewing time is a reasonable indicator of a person’s overall sedentary pattern,” he says. “Modern society has come to mean a lot of us simply shift from chair to chair throughout the day: seat in the car, the office, the couch at home.”
Several medical research bodies – including Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and, in the US, the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Mayo Clinic – have been looking into the specific mechanisms that link time spent on one’s bum with poor health. One is obvious and well-known: fewer calories are burnt, you get fatter and there are health consequences. The other is more insidious. It seems that muscle contractions – even very small ones such as those required to keep us standing upright – trigger important processes to do with the breakdown of fats and sugars. When we sit down, those muscle contractions cease and the processing stalls. The good news is they restart shortly after we stand up again.
“You increase your metabolic rate between 10 and 20 per cent above resting simply by getting up off your bottom – not walking anywhere, but simply standing up,” says says Dr James Levine, professor of medicine with the Mayo Clinic.
”And there is a whole cascade of metabolic [phenomena] that are activated within two minutes, perhaps sooner, of getting up and bearing your own weight. That cascade involves insulin receptor activation, lipo protein lipase [an enzyme that helps break down fat] activity and more. And these things are deactivated within several minutes of getting down off your legs.”
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