Japanese sit more than anyone else, to the point it undermines their health

We sit too much. Way too much. Japanese especially. Japanese sit more than anyone in the world. It won’t do, says fitness magazine Tarzan (Feb 9).

This sort of thing is tracked, weighed and measured like everything else. The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, in a 2011 global survey, found one nation whose people sit, on average, more than 10 hours a day: Japan. The closest competition came from Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Norway, Lithuania and the Czech Republic – all roughly equal at about nine hours. The least chair-bound were the Portuguese – four hours, and Brazilians – four and a half.

What’s wrong with sitting? A lot, it turns out. Everyone knows the health threats posed by alcohol, tobacco, overeating and the like. Over-sitting is no less damaging. The evidence is clear. Sitting too much heightens risks and symptoms of cancer, depression, COVID, obesity and premature death. We’re sitting ourselves to death.

A first, faint warning flashed in 1953. British researchers found that conductors working on double-decker buses, hopping from floor to floor, lived longer than drivers. Time passed, conveniences multiplied. Now they’re a glut, and there’s scarcely any reason to rise to our feet. The smartphone proliferation was the last straw. We work, play, shop, game, get together, entertain ourselves, inform ourselves, online. Why stand? Our legs dangle forgotten. We forget we have them.

The 1953 finding launched 70 years of copious, intricate, vastly detailed research. Tarzan cites an Australian survey tracking 220,000 individuals, aged 45 and up, over 2.8 years. Eight hours was the borderline it found between excessive and moderate sitting. The conclusion compared the death rates of those who habitually sat 11 or more hours a day with those sitting four hours or less. The former’s was 40 percent higher.

Swedish research using similar methods compared depression and anxiety, finding  it 3.9 times more likely among the chair-bound.

Also couch-bound. There’s a notion going round that, if sitting is bad, reclining is OK. Forget it, says Tarzan. To the body, reclining is sitting under another name. The problem is “sedentary behavior,” meaning hyper-inactivity. It’s built into modern living and must be fought, a current we must swim against.

How? Exercise, is what first comes to mind. Correct – partly. When it takes the form of strenuous weekend gym workouts to compensate for weekday office sitting topped by home living room sitting, it’s no good. The key is less the number of hours exercised over an extended period of time than how much sitting you do at one time. Half an hour is the boundary line fitness experts have drawn. Half an hour’s uninterrupted sitting verges on too much; an hour’s crosses the line altogether. Two hours at the gym on weekends won’t repair the damage. Our “sedentary behavior” must be interrupted – frequently if briefly – by flinging the body about in any circulation-enhancing manner that pleases you. The work-space – whether home or office or driver’s seat or whatever – must, if we’re to preserve sound health into a rapidly expanding old age – make allowances for a inescapable evolutionary fact.

It is  this: The human body, animal in all its fundamentals, evolved for movement.  “Move!” it cries. “Sit still!” is modern life’s outraged rejoinder – a temptation to which we yield at our peril.

© Japan Today