Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA (2012)

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18 pointslaurex7 comments

A lot of people try to blame obesity and poor health on the lack of active behavior in the USA. "You're a sedentary person therefore you end up fat" is the idea. But more often than not I see active people get fat from the horrible sugar laden food and getting out and moving is painful and horrible for them. It happened to my brothers and my parents, it happened to friends and family and it happened to me.

Lately I've been getting it under control with fasting and home cooked meals. But it's seriously hard in America to avoid the horrible food. It's freaking everywhere.

This is pretty weak imo. The effect could easily just be due to the fact that someone who is morbidly obese probably isn’t capable of standing for very long. Because they would be included in the sitting group, it would easily skew the data. Not a fan of this study at all.

3 hours is a very short period. I can't think of a single day in my life where I sat for less than 3 hours. I mean, I glanced at the paper and as far as I can tell that include eating breakfast, lunch and dinner (easily 1.5 hours right there). Even if I'm on my feet for the whole working day, I guarantee that I'll be taking a rest at night either playing a video game, reading a book or watching TV.

Saying that, I basically don't believe the study. The data was self reported and I literally don't believe that there is a statistically significant portion of the population who sit for less than 3 hours a day on average. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the study...

It would probably be more useful to study primitive tribes and see how long they sit per day to see what our bodies might be adapted to.

I also find it hard to believe that people can sit for less than 3 hours per day consistently, given commute times as well.

You'd have to be doing manual labor on your property from sun up to sun down and only sit from sun down until bedtime to get close to 3hrs.

You're confusing self-reported sitting with objectively measured sitting. The paper mentions both, mentions the rather large difference, and the reported correlation with life expectancy is for self-reported sitting.

A person who self reports little sitting is just likely to have a standing or physical job. So this is a weak version of correlating physical activity.

If that's true I'd be dead by now.

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