Why sitting is the new smoking (and my $25 solution)

Disclosure: The author is the CEO of Hootsuite. Oristand is Holmes’ side venture.

Maybe it’s time for a Surgeon General’s Warning: “Using this product may lead to heart disease, obesity, cancer and Type 2 diabetes. Prolonged exposure has been linked to premature death. Use at your own risk.”

I’m not talking about cigarettes. I’m talking about chairs.

Sitting, the innocent act of plopping down in your seat, is the smoking of our generation. Just like lighting up used to be, the sitting habit is so pervasive, so universally accepted, as to be almost invisible. And just as was the case with smoking, scientists are slowly gathering an irrefutable body of evidence showing that sitting for long periods literally takes years off your life.

The dangers of sitting

Case in point: A 2009 study of 17,000 people found that those who spent most of the day sitting were 54 percent more likely to die of heart attacks. An even larger 2010 study of 123,000 people showed that men who sit six or more hours a day have a 20 percent higher overall death rate than men who sit three or fewer hours. For women, the death rate is 40% higher. More recently, an extensive review of 43 studies found that people who sit for long hours each day have a 24 percent greater risk of colon cancer, 32 percent greater risk of endometrial cancer and 21 percent greater risk of lung cancer.

I know what you’re thinking: Sure, those are scary stats, but all those unhealthy sitters were probably couch potatoes who never got any exercise. Nope.

Research indicates that even if you get lots of exercise when you’re not sitting, you still face these same risks. In other words, you could be a gym rat or a long distance runner with a resting pulse rate of 40 beats per minute, but if you’re sitting most of the day, you’re doing irreparable harm to your body. Exercise won’t help you any more than would trying to “counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging,” writes New York Times reporter James Vlahos.

The moment you sit, your muscles begin to go silent.

The moment you sit, your muscles begin to go silent. Your energy consumption drops to a meagre one calorie per minute, about a third of the walking rate. Insulin effectiveness plummets, increasing the risk of Type 2 diabetes. Enzymes responsible for vacuuming up fat in the bloodstream plunge, causing levels of HDL (the “good” cholesterol) to dip. The risk of obesity increases, too. “Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” explains Dr. James Levine, a Mayo Clinic researcher who began sounding the sitting alarm nearly 20 years ago. In no uncertain terms, your chair is killing you.

But in spite all of the studies and publicity (there’s even a TED Talk about the dangers of sitting with 1.6 million views), lots of us still spend most of the day on our backsides. The average American, in fact, sits about eight hours per day, each and every day of the week, every week of the year. Habits are hard to break, and there’s something undeniably addictive about taking a load off and slumping into a chair. But I have a theory that part of the problem may be technological, not cultural. We’re still on our butts because desks that let you stand up just aren’t plentiful enough, cheap enough or flexible enough for the bulk of users.

Why current commercial standing desks aren’t exactly flying off the shelves

A recent search for “standing desks” on Amazon, for instance, produced 30,020 results. While options are diverse, none are perfect and few are cheap. Basic full-size standing desks – sturdy, waist-high workstations that let you work on your feet – start at a few hundred dollars. Decent desktop models – accessories you put on top of your old-fashioned desk – start around $100. Neither of these solutions are really ideal. Standing all day, as any physical therapist will tell you, brings its own set of health problems, from sore feet and swollen legs to lower back and neck complications.

A proper desk actually needs to be fully adjustable between standing and sitting positions. And while we’re starting to see some adjustable options, prices are prohibitively expensive, with fancy, motorised versions running into the thousands of dollars. I haven’t even gotten into the fact that almost all of these standing desks are big and bulky, requiring major furniture rearrangements. Given the expense and the logistics involved, it’s little wonder we’re all still glued to our seats.

If I sound obsessed about this subject, there’s a reason. Several years ago, I was on a quest for the perfect standing desk. Injuries from years of judo and ultimate frisbee had left me with herniated discs and I couldn’t sit for more than a few hours at a time. I needed a desk that could go back and forth between sitting and standing. The solution had to be dirt cheap, since I had sunk my life’s savings into a social media company called Hootsuite. And since we were in startup mode – constantly outgrowing spaces and shifting seating arrangements – the desk had to be lightweight and easy to move from place to place.

Our solution