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Don't Blame Sitting — Yet — for Shorter Lives of the Sedentary
- DLWormwood 14y agoThis is the same old “correlation is not causation” thing that the press never seems to understand. Move along; nothing to see here…
- mertd 14y agoThey understand it well. Problem is, you rarely produce big headlines without jumping to conclusions.
- joe_the_user 14y agoThis mis-characterizes the article. "Correlation is not causation" can be said about anything. The article has a number of specific findings which weaken the original finding. Just about every strong and weak scientific finding involves correlation. "Correlation is not causation" comes into play most strongly when a correlation seems assign causation to something with no clear underlying physical mechanism - leap years and stock market behavior, etc. But one could imagine a number of plausible physical mechanism whereby sitting could be back bad for one. That still doesn't prove it but it different lines of reasoning could appropriate.
- pessimizer 14y agoBut the obvious correlation is that of the million situations that could cause someone to sit more, more of them lead to early death than extended life. For example, asthma, arteriosclerosis, and obesity are known to lead to both situations. When a study comes out that exhaustively controls for at least all of known factors that cause both situations being correlated, give me a call.
- rogerbinns 14y agoWhat commenters never seem to understand is that the "press" are commercial for profit ventures, and to a first approximation get paid for page views (on dead trees or web sites). It is in their interest to publish whatever furthers that goal, up to the point they drive readers away. If readers punished the press for this then they would stop doing it. But readers don't, and as such the stories in the press reflect on what people want to read. And as much as people claim to be high and mighty, only want good news etc, they actually read all the salacious erroneous stuff.
- gpcz 14y agoThe WSJ previously wrote an article titled "Sitting for More Than Three Hours A Day Cuts Life Expectancy," and now they backpedal by writing an entire article summarizing that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Unfortunately, the damage is already done. The Illusion-Of-Truth effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory#Illusion-of-truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory#Illusion-of-tr... ) is a cognitive bias that states people will believe familiar statements, sometimes even after being told they're false.
- reinhardt 14y agoSpeaking of correlation, it would be interesting to see if there is one between the publication of these two WSJ articles and the sales of standing desks.
- pessimizer 14y agoStep 1: Flurry of fearmongering articles that appeal to the prejudices of the target audience with logical hole large enough to drive a freight train through (usually correlation=causation/post-hoc reasoning or statistical silliness.) Step 2: sell tons of papers, products, and ads to the credulous. Step 3: point out logical flaw. Step 4: sell tons of papers and ads to the incredulous. Step 5: profiles of the people who were influenced by the original story, painting them as crazies (or are they visionaries? You, the reader, decide!) Step 6: sell tons of papers and ads to the gawkers. Final disposition: People get stupider as a result of reading the paper than they would have been by completely avoiding it, and they completely dismiss everything they read, relying instead on their prejudices and what they heard from a guy once. edit: I've noticed the successful garbage health panics seem to be structured like sympathetic magic (like-with-like, metaphors, symbolic connections.) For example, "Study Finds Depression Causes Death in Close Relatives" won't work, but "Study Finds Depression Causes Heart Disease" does. I think of this one as "Study Finds Standing Up Prevents Lying Down."
- Produce 14y agoStep 1: throw all your newspapers in the bin, cancel your subscriptions and point all of the major news sites' URL's to 127.0.0.1. Step 2: start reading scientific journals and other high quality sources of information. Step 3: call all of your friends idiots for not doing the same. Step 4: begin to hate your life more and more because you can't identify with the appaling ignorance that surrounds you. Pessimistic step 5: throw yourself off of a tall building. Optimistic step 5: build a rocket ship and fly to the moon. Final disposition: you are no longer a part of society at large.
- flatline 14y agoStep 6: Realize that, however well-informed you may be in some narrow field, we are all woefully ignorant of so many other things that said knowledge is, in a broader scope, quite trivial, and that separating from society at large is just another symptom of said ignorance;)
- BCM43 14y agoTried this, don't have enough time to get past step 2.
- aimatt 14y agoI made my own standing desk and I've been using it for a year now. I won't go back because just by doing that, I have more energy through the day. Who cares what the flip-flopping WSJ keeps saying.
- tptacek 14y agoYou are very possibly harming yourself far more with a standing desk than you would by sitting. Sitting is correlated with fat metabolism issues, but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease; standing was shown in studies to correlate with increased stress hormones and increased blood density. You are better off setting a timer and, every 20-30 minutes or so, getting up and moving around (you don't have to exercise strenously; just walking for a couple minutes from one spot to another seems to do it).
- needle0 14y agoYou sound quite certain for what appears to me to be equally ambiguous; Can you elaborate if you have some evidence which points to the hazards of standing far outweighing those of sitting?
- vwoolf 14y agoSitting is correlated with fat metabolism issues, but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease; standing was shown in studies to correlate with increased stress hormones and increased blood density. [Citation needed] This isn't meant as a threat, either: I'd be quite interested in a comprehensive literature review of this stuff. It reminds me a bit of the brouhaha around barefoot running: some decent evidence suggests barefoot is "better," while some suggests that forefoot striking is really the key. Expert opinion is split.
- qu4z-2 14y agoI always thought the main argument for barefoot running was that it makes heel strikes and other things noticeably unpleasant, thus encouraging proper technique (forefoot striking). Source: I don't run, but I read an article once.
- Alex3917 14y agoThese studies on sitting on completely overblown. One of the most consistent findings that holds true across all cultures is that the more years of schooling people have, the longer they live. If sitting was really all bad for you, this wouldn't be the case since not only is schooling a highly sedentary activity, but people with more schooling are also much more likely to have sedentary jobs.
- graeme 14y agoYou're ignoring the possibility that sitting is bad, but the negative impact is outweighed by the other advantages accompanied by education. (Not saying that's the true explanation)
- Alex3917 14y ago"You're ignoring the possibility that sitting is bad, but the negative impact is outweighed by the other advantages accompanied by education." I mean that's basically what I believe to be the case. Even if sitting is bad for you, which I'm not convinced of but which wouldn't especially surprise me, I'm sure that for many people the good effects of sitting can outweigh the bad, not just in school but all throughout life.
- dllthomas 14y agoThose aren't "good effects of sitting", they are good effects of other things which typically involve sitting. The place most people I've talked to went, when seeing the original article, was talking about standing desks. If it is in fact the sitting-as-opposed-to-standing that is having an impact, that would be a good way of having the benefits of a desk job without the sitting. I don't think anyone read it and said, "Oh, I'd better quit my cushy desk job and become a coal miner."
- RageKit 14y agoWow, that viral campaign to sell standing desk begins to get really weird.
- rwhitman 14y agoIsn't it obvious that sitting for prolonged periods of time is completely unnatural? We have evolved to run, jump, climb, not spend 8 hrs a day compressing our spines - it is only in the last 100 or so years that sedentary occupations have become the norm
- kkowalczyk 14y agoAll it means that at some point we'll evolve to be really good at sitting. I'm doing my share to make that happen.
- algorias 14y agoSure, that will happen at some point. Don't hold your breath though; evolution works over extremely long timescales (hundreds if not thousands of generations)
- aptwebapps 14y agoThe evolutionary pressure of people dying at 65 instead of 66 (completely made up numbers) is pretty small, especially in a modern society where their dependents will not usually starve as a result.
- sliverstorm 14y agoHow can you say it is completely unnatural? First, have you ever seen cheetahs? Even in their natural environment, they laze about almost all day. Second, we are intrinsically lazy, and not because "the modern world has corrupted us". Notice I am not claiming that our bodies were in fact designed to sit forever, but can we really declare it is "obvious" that sitting for a long time is against our nature?
- nhebb 14y ago> Second, we are intrinsically lazy From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we would preserve energy. Food wasn't always plentiful, and unnecessary calorie burning would work against survival and propagation of the species.