The dangers of sitting

Are you sitting down for this? In most workplaces, most of the time, the answer would be yes, and it turns out that’s high-risk behaviour. In the past few years, research papers have been piling up, all with the same message: Sitting for long stretches of time is having a profoundly negative effect on employee health.

First, there’s back, neck and shoulder discomfort, felt by just about anyone who’s hunched over a keyboard for too many hours at a time. Florida-based orthopedic surgeon Dr. Alfred O. Bonati, founder of the Bonati Spine Institute, says, “Sitting for prolonged periods of time can be a major cause of back pain, cause increased stress of the back, neck, arms and legs and can add a tremendous amount of pressure to the back muscles and spinal discs.” He adds, “Additionally, sitting in a slouched position can overstretch the spinal ligaments and strain the spinal discs.”

There are also less obvious complications. A 2015 study by the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found the amount of time a person sits during the day is associated with a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and death — regardless of whether or not the individuals were getting regular exercise.

David Alter, co-author of the study and a senior scientist with the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute points out many studies on the subject have yielded similar results. “The risks of prolonged sitting or prolonged sedentary behaviour are fairly consistent for all-cause mortality, for heart attacks, cancer and diabetes,” says Alter. “They range in magnitude depending on the study. In some studies it may be as much as a two-fold higher risk, and in other studies it may be 15 per cent more. The magnitude of that risk is still being refined.”

Given the typical eight-hour workday, even conservative findings suggest most office-based workers would be at risk. “If we look at a waking-hour day of 16 hours or so the risks really begin to rise after about six hours a day of sitting and they accelerate after nine to 12, or more,” says Dr. Alter. “All studies seem to agree that when people are sitting for tremendously long periods of time — upwards of nine hours — the risks seem to be substantive.”

Risks reduced by exercise?

The 2015 UHN study also found that exercise, while still critical for general health, doesn’t appear to offset the risks of sitting. “What it looks to be now, even more crystalized, is that the risks of prolonged sedentary behaviour seem to be completely independent of exercise,” says Alter. “They may be targeting different aspects of our health and our bodies.”

A 2016 study by Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Los Angeles and the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute in Ottawa that followed more than 17,000 Canadians over 12 years, backed up those findings. The more time participants spent sitting, the greater their risk of death from heart disease, regardless of how much they exercised, their age, sex, smoking status or alcohol consumption.

What happens when we sit?

Dr. James Levine, co-director of Obesity Solutions at the Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University and inventor of the treadmill desk, is the author of Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You. In his book, Levine notes, “Put simply, the danger in prolonged sitting is that it stalls the metabolic machinery. The body has an exquisitely designed system for trafficking fuels such as carbohydrates and fats. Serious consequences result when the muscular engine sits on idle.”

Inactivity, says Levine, impedes the body’s ability to metabolize fat and sugar and elevates triglycerides, potentially raising the risk for cardiovascular disease. He also notes that research demonstrates sitting for long periods suppresses lipase, an enzyme that helps metabolize fat and is produced only when leg muscles flex. Decreased levels of lipase are associated with heart disease and other illnesses. Levine notes that the metabolism of hormones such as estrogen and testosterone are disrupted, as well.

Standing up to sitting

To combat excessive sitting time, some employers have introduced sit-to-stand desk options for their employees. EY Canada, for example, has installed variable-height desks at 60 per cent of the workstations in its new Toronto tower. Globally, says Jeannine Pereira, EY Canada’s Talent Leader, the desks are part of a company-wide transition to more flexible workspaces, empowering people to change their work environment as they want.

Sit-to-stand options have been popular at EY’s offices across the country, says Pereira.

The desks, though, are just one element of a bigger-picture plan. “The concept encourages movement,” says Pereira, and that, according to Alter, might be the best aspect of sit-to-stand desks.

“What I like about the idea of the standing desk is that it does change the culture of the workplace and gets people thinking about health,” says Alter. “I think the key is in how we replace sedentary activity. We don’t know whether, for example, light activity is sufficient. We don’t know, if we can get people to stand instead of sit, is that better for their health or do they actually need to take steps and move in some way, shape or form?”

Standing for prolonged periods can have potential risks, too, Alter points out, including back and knee pain for some.

It can have more serious implications, as well: A 2017 study by the Institute for Work & Health and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto found a higher risk of heart disease among those who mainly stood on the job, compared to those who mainly sat.

Peter Smith, lead researcher on the project and a senior scientist with the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto noted a combination of sitting, standing and moving on the job was likely to have the greatest benefits for heart health.

Walk and talk

In response to headline news about the dangers of sitting, business publications including Wired, Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur, began investigating the benefits of walk-and-talk meetings.

Swapping sitting time for steps might have benefits that go beyond employee health as well. A 2015 study conducted by Harvard Business Review found those who participated in walking meetings were 5.25 per cent more likely to report being creative at their jobs than those who did not. Additionally, the responses suggested that walking meetings support cognitive engagement on the job — walking meeting participants were 8.5 per cent more likely to report high levels of engagement.

“I think walk-and-talk meetings and engaging the workplace through health in some way is great,” says Alter. “Standing work meetings or moving work meetings or finding other ways to improve mobility of movement during work is innovative, it’s cool, but most importantly I think it gets people thinking about health,” says Alter.

“Walk-and-talk meetings may not be feasible for every workplace, but there may be other things an organization can do that will have similar effects,” says Alter. “If you must have traditional sitting meets, then have waking breaks or other episodes where people are encouraged to track their sitting times and get up every 30 minutes. In general, make the environment such that it’s more conducive or attractive to take stairs, to walk from place to place rather than taking elevators or sitting.” He adds, “There’s a lot a workplace can do to promote that culture.”

Pereira points out that EY, for example, tries to work walking and moving into many aspects of work life. “To promote movement in our new office, we created shared collaboration spaces throughout the tower,” says Pereira, including virtual collaboration rooms for working with colleagues in other locations, private rooms, and nooks for brainstorming and teamwork. “Our people move from one space to another, depending on their needs that day.” She adds, “We also made sure to offer different amenities on each floor, encouraging our people to move around and explore the tower.”

Finding the right mix