Could Simply Changing Your Chair Add Years to Your Life?

The profound difference between sitting and ‘active resting’

Photo: Image Source/Getty Images

Note: Although I’m an academic researcher, because I too suffered from back pain for quite some time, so I’m hardly a disinterested researcher. I went so far as to invent a mechanism to allow sitting to be active, and I’m the CEO of a company (QOR360) created to popularize and sell chairs that encourage active sitting. This conflict of interest disquiets me (Richard Feynman observed: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest to fool.”), but seems unavoidable.

An article with the startling title “Changing the Way You Sit Could Add Years to Your Life” was published recently in the prestigious journal New Scientist. The title makes an extraordinary claim which, if true, will change the everyday lives of most of us. But, as Carl Sagan once observed, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The senior author on the paper is David Raichlen, a prolific researcher in the biology department at University of Southern California (USC) who has spent his career understanding how humans came to require exercise for optimal health, and how our current sedentary existence is undermining our health and longevity. Almost uniquely, Raichlen’s anthropological orientation has allowed him to use the experience of contemporary hunter-gatherers to better understand our own situation.

The story Raichlen tells is fascinating, and starts like this: “We’ve long known that sedentary occupations and sedentary lives are associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, but why?”

“How could evolution produce an organism that responds so poorly to rest?”

Importantly, Raichlen isn’t asking the simple, mechanistic question: “What is sitting doing to our blood chemistry that harms our health?” This answer is already well known: passively slouching for many hours a day lowers our lipoprotein lipase levels— raising our bad cholesterol, lowering our good cholesterol, and increasing our insulin levels. All of this happening in concert increases our risks for diabetes, heart…