It used to be the only way your boss felt like you were working was if your butt was in the seat of your office chair. However, research shows sitting could be detrimental to your health.
The sitting epidemic may have all started at work. However, since wonderful inventions like the TV, we began to leave work and come home to sit some more in front of our big entertainment screen. Munching healthy foods like microwave dinners, Ho Hos, and chips.
When computers became more portable, we began taking them with us to sit here, there, or anywhere. Still today, gamers sit transfixed playing endless-multi-level games into the wee hours of the morning, moving only to get more snacks out of the kitchen. And we wonder why we have an obesity issue.
Since the advent of pre-K, students as young as three or four have been forced to sit in schools, and continue to be reprimanded for moving. Today, many are categorized ADD or ADHD merely for the fact they can't sit still. If I was a young student today, I would definitely have been pigeonholed into one of these classifications. But these kids are just doing what comes natural.
We are built to move. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. says, "Much like a Ferrari, the human is meant to move." Kids instinctively know that. I would even go so far as to speculate the proliferation of ADD and ADHD is a direct evolutionary response to our sedentary life.
Sitting for extended periods of time, according to a recent 12-year study by Canada's Pennington Biomedical Research Centre which involved 17,000 people, increases the risk of heart disease, type-two diabetes, and osteoporosis not to mention back and shoulder pain.
It makes you wonder if libel suits will come up against corporations and educational facilities as they did against fast-food restaurants as far back as 2000. In 2000, it was announced that a poor diet and physical inactivity caused 400,000 deaths, a 33% jump over 1990.
It was also the year, the U.S. House of Representatives recognized the concept of 'personal responsibility', and gave their overwhelming approval of a bill banning lawsuits by obese customers who say they became overweight by eating at fast-food restaurants.The debate started when the government announced that overeating could soon replace smoking as the No. 1 preventable cause of death - with a statistic that two out of three adults, and nine million children are overweight or obese. Republicans argued that exposing the fast food industry to suits like those against the tobacco industry would wreak havoc on an industry that employs almost 12 million people -- the nation's 2nd largest employer behind the government.
Most obesity claims have been dismissed in court. However, the suits have pushed
restaurants and snack food makers to offer a larger number of more healthful products. Will similar healthier ways to work and study be implemented in corporations and schools? I hope so. People may be dying to know what the future of workstations and school desks will be. Until then, let start a Movement to get off our butts whether our teachers or bosses like it or not.
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