Sitting Comparable to Obesity, almost to Smoking

Being sedentary, which can include sitting for long periods of time, has been linked to diabetes and death from heart disease or stroke. The new study [published in BMJ Open; absract here] takes it a few steps further by showing just how much we can benefit by sitting less frequently.

"Sitting is a risk factor, not a disease," says Peter Katzmarzyk, PhD. He's an associate executive director for population science at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University System in Baton Rouge, La. "It's comparable to obesity, and it's almost to the level of smoking," he says.

"We sit to eat and don't tend to stand up a whole lot," he says. "We need to turn that around and engineer sitting out of our lives."

-from a WebMD post of July 9, 2012.