The Homa Files

Public enemy No. 1 in today’s workplace: the office chair .

Americans sit an average of almost 9 hours per day … but. the spine wasn’t meant to stay for long periods in a seated position … especially in a typical office chair.

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Quick Takes from Bloomberg Business Week: Your Office Chair Is Killing You, April 29, 2010

“Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much worse than a standard office chair.” 

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.

“People with obesity have a natural predisposition to be attracted to their chair.”

Lean people, on average, stand for two hours longer than their counterparts.

“If you’re standing around and puttering, you recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never tire … they’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.”

• One enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, grabs fat and cholesterol from the blood, burning the fat into energy while shifting the cholesterol from LDL (the bad kind) to HDL (the healthy kind).
• When you sit, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to camp out in the bloodstream. Within a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%.

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.:

Full article:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_19/b4177071221162.htm

This entry was posted on June 4, 2010 at 7:07 am and is filed under Health & Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.