Every few months the scientific community likes to remind us to get off our butts.
This week, researchers who looked through the results of five recent studies on the link between staying seated and health outcomes came out with a new conclusion: sitting for more than three hours per day cuts about two years off your life expectancy.
They added that watching more than two hours of TV per day will cut your life expectancy down another year or so. An even bleaker discovery? Moderate exercise doesn't seem to offset the effects of this excessive sitting either.
"It's not just about getting physical activity in your life," lead author Dr Peter T Katzmarzyk of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told Businessweek. "Just because you're doing 30 minutes of physical activity, what about the other 23.5 hours. Don't just sit the rest of the day."
The study, published in BMJ Open, follows a long line of unsurprising "sitting is bad for you" literature, underscores that increasingly sedentary lifestyles are a deserved topic of major focus in recent years.
Previous studies have already told us that staying perched on our derrieres all day isn't great for our health, linking lots of ailments – from cancer to diabetes and more – to staying seated for any number of hours per day.
So what's the solution for those of us whose jobs involve lots of sitting time … say, in front of a computer, writing an article about how it's bad to be seated in front of a computer?
The good folks over at HuffPo tried out a treadmill desk last summer, which is one way to go for the uber-determined (though they didn't give it rave reviews). Standing desks are gaining popularity too.
There are also some little things you can do every day, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, standing while you eat lunch, and even walking over to your colleagues instead of sending off an email. It may sound as obvious as Gawker's mockery that "In other breaking news, you should try harder to eat fruits and vegetables," but let's face it, sometimes we all need a reminder to get up.
What are your tricks for moving more at the office?
Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter @GuardianUS, and we'll add your answers to this post.
