Sitting is lethal

This is getting too easy.  It's as if I have a whole team of reporters over at the New York Times who are doing all my health research for me -- and they're doing a bang up job.  It's true, I was being a little lazy in a past edition of Upstanding Citizen when I said that standing makes you "die less or something".  A few of you pushed back on the science behind it.  (As you should have.)  Well, here it is, in black and white, baby:

Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

...

Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”

Read the whole thing, it's juicy.  Past installments of Upstanding Citizen here.  Thanks to Rob, Aleta, and many others for the pointer.