Sitting is the New Smoking: Understand The Numbers Behind The Catchphrase

Several years ago I came across many blog headlines that went something to the effect of “sitting is the new smoking.” Maybe you have read one or two (example 1, example 2). At first, those titles scared me out of my seat! I thought: I don’t smoke…but how can this be a thing?!?! I mean, I have been sitting all my life, and I am pretty good at it.

So I kept reading and soon realized that a wealth of research has accumulated (in the past 10 years)…and it was time to change my lifestyle.

If you have followed anything BehaviorFit over the past year or so, you may read previous articles related to sitting or sedentary. I cover it extensively in my workshops. But, getting back to that simple headline opened up a whole world of curiosity…and to say the least, changed my life forever.

I wanted to know:

• How are smoking and sitting even related?
• What does that mean for me TODAY? Should I never sit down? (The quick answer is here: If Sitting is So Bad, Should I Stand All Day?)
• Most importantly, what’s all the fuss about?!?!

I have found that the popular presses flood you with unnecessary, technical, and complicated (research-based) details. They confuse you will a simpler take home message.

Here I break down the catchphrase into 3 important parts: The Idea, The Numbers, and The GamePlan.

The Idea: Comparing Sitting to Smoking

We can all agree that smoking is bad for us. Smoking causes cancer with a boatload of other ill effects (bad breath, yellow teeth, stinky clothes). Sorry smoking, you have been demonized and are now forever used to analyze any other health risks. By comparing sitting to smoking implies that the effects of sitting must be at least as bad, if not worse, than smoking.

(insert suspenseful pause)

The Numbers: Sitting and Smoking as Apples

When comparing two things, they should be in a similar category. You do not want to compare apples to oranges. How do researchers allow themselves to compare sitting to smoking? They find a common ground (or in sciencey-terms, a common dependent variable).

The common ground for sitting and smoking is: minutes of life lost

This may sound weird or a little complicated, but here I explain…

To complete this kind of research about sitting or standing, you start with large groups of people. Then, you ask people at the beginning and the end of a study about their behavior (how much they smoke, how much they sit). In the process, you count everyone’s ages and how many people are alive at the end of the study.

Eventually, you learn the relationships between living a long life and smoking, and living a long life and sitting. Studies on smoking find that the less you smoke, the longer you live. And sitting studies find that the less often you sit, the better it is for your health (Young et al., 2016; for more detail about this relationship go here: EXERCISE ISN’T EVERYTHING).

Then, statisticians run a bunch of numbers and distill the information down into something relatable to everyday behavior. This now becomes a mathematical comparison of sitting to smoking:

For every cigarette you smoke: you lose 11 minutes off of your life (Shaw, 2000)

For every hour you spend sitting: you lose 22 minutes off of your life (Levine, 2014)

By numbers alone, sitting turns out to be worse than smoking! And now I hear in a strange alternate universe, a cigarette played by Matt Damon talking to chair saying: “How do you like them apples!!!”

It is tempting to say that smoking a cigarette while sitting down takes 33 minutes off of your life, but that research has not been done and will not be done. Conducting this research would be next to impossible (requiring people to sit and smoke for decades) and most importantly, unethical.

So that’s the comparison. All the blogs, headlines, and clickbait boil down to those (or similar) numbers above. Now, when you come across future articles on the internet, you will have a better sense of what is being discussed and make better (informed) decisions related to your health.

The Gameplan: Our Everyday Action

As I began sifting through blogs and research, I found that guidelines and public policy were lacking. I wanted to know what to do TODAY. It took me 2-3 years to patch together guidelines from various fields (cardiology, ergonomics, public health). Then, to my surprise, the experts released a consensus statement (Buckley, 2015). Here is the gameplan they gave us…

As it related to sitting, we need to:

1. Reduce sitting time by 2 hours each day, working up to 4 hours, and

2. Move every 30 minutes.

These guidelines have been covered extensively in the Know Your Guidelines blog series. There was even a special post for individuals with Type II diabetes.

To see how others are following these guidelines, check out The Standing Initiative and learn how to remove sitting from your work day!

Meeting these minimum standards is just a start. Regular movement is just one pillar of health as described in The BehaviorFit Manifesto. Your own personal journey to good health takes purposeful practice and continual adaptation to your environment. We have to balance what we can sacrifice today for a better tomorrow.

BehaviorFit has developed an in-depth workshop specifically on movement and reducing sitting in the workplace. Contact BehaviorFit to schedule a webinar or live workshop for yourself and your coworkers today!

Keep moving my friends,

Nick

References:

Levine, J. A. (2014). Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You and what You Can Do about it. Macmillan.

Shaw, M., Mitchell, R., & Dorling, D. (2000). Time for a smoke? One cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes. Bmj, 320(7226), 53-53.

Young, D. R., Hivert, M. F., Alhassan, S., Camhi, S. M., Ferguson, J. F., Katzmarzyk, P. T., … & Yong, C. M. (2016). Sedentary Behavior and Cardiovascular Morbidity and Mortality: A Science Advisory From the American Heart Association. Circulation, 134(13), e262-e279.