Why Frequent Sitting is Bad For Health

I ran across this very informative article today.  Everyone pretty much agrees and understands that prolonged sitting is bad for your back.  I’ve been educating patients about this from day one of my career as a chiropractor.  The body is designed to be upright most of the time, and frequently moving.  Sitting disengages the activity of critical muscles used in posture and can lead to muscle weakness and less support to the spine, leading to degenerative joint disease and chronic back pain.

This article confirms this and goes further to state that prolonged sitting can actually increase your bad cholesterol levels! Here’s what it says:

If you’re standing around and puttering, you recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never tire,” (Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton) says. “They’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.” One enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, grabs fat and cholesterol from the blood, burning the fat into energy while shifting the cholesterol from LDL (the bad kind) to HDL (the healthy kind). When you sit, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to camp out in the bloodstream. Within a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%.

The data back him up. Older people who move around have half the mortality rate of their peers. Frequent TV and Web surfers (sitters) have higher rates of hypertension, obesity, high blood triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and high blood sugar, regardless of weight. Lean people, on average, stand for two hours longer than their counterparts.

The chair you’re sitting in now is likely contributing to the problem. “Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much worse than a standard office chair,” says Galen Cranz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She explains that the spine wasn’t meant to stay for long periods in a seated position. Generally speaking, the slight S-shape of the spine serves us well. “If you think about a heavy weight on a C or S, which is going to collapse more easily? The C,” she says. But when you sit, the lower lumbar curve collapses, turning the spine’s natural S-shape into a C, hampering the abdominal and back musculature that support the body. The body is left to slouch, and the lateral and oblique muscles grow weak and unable to support it.

So there you have it.  If you have a job that involves sitting for more than 20 minutes straight (very common in the Financial District of San Francisco), you’ve got to take action and break the cycle– stand up and stretch every 20 minutes; try using one of those “knee chairs” that distributes some of your weight to your knees and legs and preserves the S-curve of the spine; or even consider asking your boss if you can ditch the chair and have a standing work station.  Bottom line– prolonged sitting is bad for your back, and bad for your health!

If you haven’t been in awhile to get your spine adjusted, now’s a good time.  Adjustments help your vertebrae move better, which is critical for those who sit for long periods.

Dan Perez, DC

San Francisco Chiropractors

Tagged as: Low back pain, posture, sitting