ARE you sitting comfortably?
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Chances will be you probably are.
But then think about it — sitting down, taking it easy on the weekend, after sitting all day and all week at work, having travelled there sitting in the car — you begin to realise we’re doing an awful lot of sitting around.
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And our lives are constantly being modified in ways that allow us to do more and more sitting.
But a world-renowned speaker will address Border employers next week on the dangers of such sedentary behaviour in the workplace as part of a community-wide drive — Healthy Together Wodonga.
With almost $2.4 million over four years Wodonga Council, in partnership with Gateway Health, hopes to get people moving towards a healthier lifestyle.
Healthy Together Victoria is a “fresh approach” to reducing the rates of preventable chronic disease across the community.
Led by team leader Claire Taylor, it aims to get the community to work together, with the council as a resource team, to make connections and create new partnerships for “better health outcomes”.
Professor David Dunstan, head of the physical activity laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, will speak in Wodonga next week on how we can go about this.
Working closely with Professor Neville Owen, head of the behavioural epidemiology laboratory, they have been looking into insight relevant to public health policy.
“The way I put it is we are looking into new findings relevant to preventing the big chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and some cancers,” Professor Owen says.
People, he says, have long been thinking hard about exercising and physical activity, getting out and doing their regular walking and sport.
“That clearly is highly beneficial to health,” he says.
“What we’ve just had is a real eye-opener from people wearing electronic devices on their hips when we do big population studies.
“What these accelerometers show is that very few people meet the activity guidelines and the majority of people’s days are spent sitting.
“When you look at the relationship between time sitting with waist circumference, blood glucose and insulin, the more sitting and the less break up the worse things look.”
Professor Owen says that there have been a lot of studies that have linked overall time sitting and its relationship to premature death from things like heart disease and diabetes.
“That seems to be apparent even when you control for weight, activity, age, education and a whole range of things,” he says.
“That the relationship to people dying prematurely and television time and overall sitting time comes through so strongly.”
So now’s probably a good time to get up and stretch your legs.
As the world changes, the more time we’re spending sitting.
Changes driven by advances in technology, transport infrastructure and work environments have been conducive to more sedentary lifestyles.
Sitting for more than six hours a day makes employees up to 40 per cent more likely to die within 15 years than someone who sits fewer than three, even if the person meets the recommended guidelines for physical activity.
And people with sitting jobs have twice the rate of cardiovascular disease as people with standing jobs.
“The world has changed to turn us increasingly into people spending huge amounts of our waking hours sitting — up to 10 to 12 hours of our 16 waking hours we can spend sitting,” Professor Owen says.
Simple things like standing up during ad breaks and breaking up the working day sat at a computer can switch off a whole lot of bad signals and bodily systems.
It might even be a case of workplaces doing more, like arranging for work areas that can be lifted up and down so work on the computer can be done standing up or sitting down.
But there are also things Professor Owen says need more of a policy change.
“Studies have shown that the long commute for people stuck in the car is also related to weight gain independent of how much exercising people do,” he says.
“So there are policy implications — the idea is not that it’s just good for the environment and congestion, but if we’ve got good public infrastructure then it’s actually good for health as well.”
What’s more the statistics are proving the point.
Last year a Victorian Population Health survey found more than half of Wodonga residents were overweight or obese and the city ranked as the fifth fattest and unhealthiest in Victoria.
A quarter of Wodonga’s residents don’t meet the recommended levels of physical activity and more than half do not eat the recommended amount of fruit and veg.
Professor Owen says this is not an exceptional case.
“Folks up there are fairly typical and that’s what you tend to see,” he says.
“The world is well designed to minimise energy expenditure and make it attractive to take energy in.
“The key message is exercising and being physically active are so important for maintaining good health.
“However, it’s also important to try to sit less and break up sitting time.
“Both are important and good for one’s health, and we need to think about both of those elements of the equation — stand up, sit less and move more, that’s what it’s about.”
Maybe next time I’ll read the paper standing at the breakfast bar.
