The latest research on the health effects of prolonged sitting is enough to keep you from ever parking your behind in a chair again.
From promoting obesity to hiking risk of diabetes and heart disease, to increasing our overall chances of dying earlier, sitting is killing us, health experts say.
"Sitting is the new smoking," Anup Kanodia, a physician and researcher at the Center for Personalized Health Care at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, tells the Los Angeles Times.
He cites an Australian study that found that for every hour of television people watched while sitting down, they lost 22 minutes off their life span, compared with 11 minutes it is estimated people lose for every cigarette smoked.
Scientists believe that humans now sit for more than half of the hours they are awake, which means they are doing a lot less walking than their ancestors did, and that is having all sorts of detrimental effects on our bodies.
"The chair is out to kill us," says James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine.
To read the complete Los Angeles Times story, go here.