All I can say is “I Told You So!”

Sitting has been become the new smoking says Dr. Anup Kanodia of Ohio State University. Several recent studies are in agreement with him suggesting that sitting lowers your life expectancy, more so than smoking.  So if you're sitting and smoking – you're toast :)

Various studies, including this Australian one from last year which found that every hour of (seated) TV watching we do cuts about 22 minutes from our life span. 

But, it's not just longevity that is affected.

One of the first things I teach during a new patient exam is the fact that we are not genetically designed to be sitting.  I'm asked all the time why our population has so many back and joint problems and the answer comes down to a pretty simple concept – living against our genetics.  As animals we were designed to be out running around, hunting animals, chasing deer, climbing rocks and picking berries; not sitting down all day.

But we spend as much as 80 per cent of our working day sedentary, sitting and unsurprisingly a similar percentage of humans experience back pain.  Being sedentary is also putting the ‘sit' in obesity, as our ability to burn fat is essentially turned off when we're stationary for extended periods. Some research even suggests that it leads to the dreaded middle age spread by the mechanical pressure sitting puts on our fat cells.

“Sitting may have more to do with obesity than [lack of] physical activity,” says Professor Adrian Bauman of Sydney University's School of Public Health.  “It is almost like sort of owning a really cool sports car and letting it idle all day long,” James Levine, an obesity expert from the Mayo Clinic, recently told NBC News. “The engine gets gunked up. That's what happens to our bodies. The body, as we know, simply isn't built to sit all day.”

So get your butt outta that chair already.  I'd be happy to write a letter for your employer!