Is your sitting job as bad for your health as smoking all day?

Your computer job may be killing you, but it’s not as bad as smoking a pack of cigarettes daily. If you sit all day working and then sit all night watching television, you still may be in for some health problems.

“The risk of death from all causes is really much greater for people who smoke heavily than it is for people who sit the most,” Dr. Gordon Cohen said on “Seattle’s Morning News,” on KIRO Newsradio. “But turns out that sitting is a serious health concern.”

Cohen explained historically, people used to be much more active. They had jobs that didn’t involve computers.

“Now, with computers, it makes it much easier for people to work for a more extended period of time,” he said. “But if we look at what people do in their lives right now, they primarily just sit. They sit at work; they come home and sit in front of the TV. Research has actually demonstrated that people are sitting for eight to 12 hours a day, so an enormous part of the day.”

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All the sitting appears to be taking a toll on our health. Cases of heart disease and diabetes are way up.

“They aren’t just simply the result of these extensive periods of time on our rear ends, but rather, it’s the hazard that’s associated with uninterrupted time,” Cohen explained. “So for example, eight hours of sitting can be okay if people get up and break it up by standing and moving around every hour.”

He said that workstations that allow you to stand up while on the computer are not as beneficial as you might think.

“You can’t just be standing,” Cohen said. “You have to move around.”

In a recent study published this year, stats found a 16% higher risk of death from any cause and a 34% higher risk of cardiovascular disease for those who predominantly sit at work compared to those who don’t.

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“Those studies show that too much sedentary time, especially for prolonged uninterrupted periods, can actually impair our glucose metabolism, and that’s associated with higher risk of type two diabetes which is also associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” Cohen explained.

So what to do? Yes, move more.

“You don’t need a fancy desk and you don’t need a fancy chair and you don’t need a fancy treadmill,” Cohen said. “Walk on really, you just need to get up every hour from what you’re doing, just move a little bit, walk around a little bit, you know, stretch a little bit, and then go back to what you’re doing. There is a common theme in all these things that we talk about, right? We always end up talking about things that cause heart disease and diabetes. Those are such common, ubiquitous themes. Always, it seems to come back to if it’s not a genetic component, it’s either our activity in one way or another and trying to eat as healthy a diet as possible.”

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, here and email him here.