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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I was inclined to disagree, but seeing the populations involved are elderly, I think you're likely correct. It would be interesting to see what the data shows in younger populations, when almost everyone is able to exercise.

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The data always turn out the same way. Healthier people exercise more. Sicker people exercise less.

One person sees sick people sitting and concludes that they are sitting because they're sick. Another person concludes that they're sick because they're sitting.

We need better-quality studies to really determine if sitting makes people sick.

"We need better-quality studies to really determine if sitting makes people sick"

This. A thousand times this. I ask because as a programmer I spend roughly 10-12 hours sitting at work and roughly 3 hours at home, with maybe an hour of walking each day, and I would like to know if I am prone to aging and being sick more due to my sitting habit or its just wrong interpretation of data and there is no significant correlation.

I think if you are walking a solid hour a day every day you are getting your exercise just fine. Even half an hour a day of walking is good.

There are studies suggesting that exercise does not totally cancel out the damage caused by long hours of sitting.

Alternatively, you can use a standing desk, or switch between a sitting and a standing desk. That way you have an additional litte exercise during the working hours.

I've read so many (anecdotal) stories about standing desks doing a number on knees and ankles that I think I'd rather go in a tanning bed than get one.

the pain on ankles is real if your floor tends to be hard. Using a soft mattress helps somewhat.

Do these issues also occur when you switch between standing and sitting?

(I suspect that the real issue is neither sitting nor standing, but monotonicity.)

In my experience -- again, completely anecdotal --, investing in a high quality office chair, mattress and set of pillows goes a long way towards less joint pain/damage. Standing desks just move the damage lower down.

I have used a standing desk for several years now. Probably standing/sitting 60/40. For a few years it was 80/20. Any issues I had where primarily related to my feet. Some good supporting sandals fixed that. Other than that I practice martial arts 2x1.5 hour a week quite intensively. Walk to work and back 40 min/day. I now control my weight easily and am much healthier and alert. Sleep one hour less per day, and still feel great.

Moderation in all things, I built my own standing desk because I wanted a huge work space and it to be higher than the usual.

I sit/stand about 50/50 (30 minutes before switching), I use a panel timer (xfce) to remind me to switch and it works great.

Everyone seems to think going all-in is the only option...I have a standing desk and stand maybe 33% of the day at most. The real issue is likely just taking a break from sitting and walking around the office every hour or so. When standing I am much more likely to walk around in the first place.

Yeah that's what I recall aas well, even think I saw it here on HN. Consensus was along the lines of 'an hour of exercise every night cannot cancel out the damage done by sitting down continuously for 8 hours' and the remedy 'interrupt sitting evrey hour or so, e.g. by a breif walk'.

"Conclusion: Prolonged sedentary time was independently associated with deleterious health outcomes regardless of physical activity."

http://annals.org/aim/article/2091327/sedentary-time-its-ass...

Found via https://blog.fitbit.com/sitting-hurts-fitbit-data-suggests-y...

Pickles will kill you! http://www.jir.com/pickles.html

I don't understand what you mean by "better-quality studies" (in the context of this study). It seems to me that you're really looking for follow-up studies.

This study "assessed the association of sedentary time with leukocyte telomere length (LTL)" [0] - that's it.

Investigating causal relationships would be another study.

You're right about alternate interpretations/speculation, though.

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/doi/10.1093/aje/kww196/...

We need better-quality studies to draw conclusions about causality. A correlation is just a correlation.

I didn't read the original study, so I don't know if it drew unwarranted conclusions about causality, but the Science Bulletin article certainly implied them.

If you haven't even read it, why would you assume anything about it?

I'm not clear on what assumption you are claiming I made. My point was about quality of evidence (see, e.g., [1]). Observational studies are considered lower-quality evidence than randomized trials.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC428525/

I see. I was under the impression that you were criticising this study in particular - apropos of assumptions.

Sorry.

There is a very convincing one where they compare health outcomes of bus drivers, who sit all day, and conductors.

London transport workers study -- coronary heart disease and physical activity of work: http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/study-synopsis/london-transpor...

Devil's advocate: Wouldn't a person who prefers sitting be more likely to keep a job as a driver rather than conductor?

An unhealthy person might think, "Ugh, I'd have to be on my feet all day." And a healthy person may not see that as a major negative.

Not everyone can be so choosey about the job they get

But some can, and maybe it's enough to impact the study. Or maybe not.

Except they control for overall health in these types of studies.

For something measuring physical activity they won't have participants that are mobility limited. They will only use people who are able to be active. Practically all medical studies put participants through an exam before accepting them to ensure they don't have conditions that would skew the results.

I don't think we need more studies to draw some useful conclusions, and sadly those conclusions do not bode well for the sedentary lifestyle. We know a lot about how human bodies evolved, both during our time as a species and our precursor species. We can also observe hunter-gatherer groups still active today, which is far more indicative of what kind of activity level we are programmed to get. One recent study I read showed that a modern hunter-gatherer group got a little over 2h of moderate to intense physical activity per day, and this produced a negligible risk of any kind of cardiovascular disease while producing a similar lifespan similar to our own. Humans evolved in an environment of this level of physical activity and we require that to retain our physical capacity and stave off disease.

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