According to the latest study by people in White Coats at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (inventors of the Swedish Bikini Team), people who sit in chairs all day die faster and more gruesome deaths than people who don't. According to lab rat Elin Ekblom-Bak, "After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals." She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down. People who sit, whether at home, in the car, or at work, are more likely to be fat, have heart trouble, and die early deaths than those who don't sit.
"No problem!" you say. "I often get up from my chair and walk to the water cooler to discuss the latest happenings with my office chums. I must be in the clear!" Sorry pal. You're still dead. Even a twenty-mile jog to the office won't do you any good. According to the Swedes, you'll just have a more muscular corpse as you lie decomposing next to the other ex-desk monkeys.
Interestingly, the inscrutable ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may have had a key breakthrough about this problem years ago. In the wake of the revelations about US-military torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld was widely criticized for pooh-poohing one particular practice -- forcing prisoners to stand for hours at a time. According to declassified documents, Rumsfeld wrote on the margins of one torture memo "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" Who knew he was just looking out for their health?
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