Cardiovascular diseases, cancers, metabolic disorders… Sitting too long at work can lead to many illnesses.
- According to a recent survey in France, more than one in five adults spends more than seven hours a day sitting.
- This prolonged sedentary lifestyle, often due to professional organizations, can be harmful to health.
- “It has been shown that people most exposed to sedentary postures have an increase in the all-cause mortality rate and the cardiovascular mortality rate,” explain INRS researchers in a new report.
In a new, comprehensive report, the national institute for research and safety (INRS) describes the potential consequences of occupational sedentariness on health.
“A sedentary posture is characterized by a sitting or lying posture maintained over time and associated with very low energy expenditure”, first indicate the authors of the document Laurent Kerangueven and Kévin Desbrosses. “At work, these sedentary postures are often induced by the organization or layout of the workstation involving prolonged maintenance of the seated posture. This is the case, for example, when working on a screen, during meetings or during tasks involving the assembly of small elements in the industrial sector,” they add.
Sedentary work increases mortality rate
Exposure to sedentary postures is associated with many health effects. “It has been shown that people most exposed to sedentary postures have an increased rate of mortality from all causes and of cardiovascular mortality,” explain the INRS researchers.
“Epidemiological studies also highlight links between exposure to sedentary postures and the occurrence of certain forms of cancer,” they emphasize.“Furthermore, an increased risk of developing obesity, type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular diseases has been described with increasing time of exposure to sedentary postures,” they write.
“Finally, several studies have revealed an association between sedentary postures and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) – notably lower back pain – or even effects on mental health,” they note.
Health: how to combat a sedentary lifestyle at work?
Given all these problems, how can we combat a sedentary lifestyle at work? “The aim is to create the conditions that allow employees to regularly break up periods spent in sedentary postures, ideally every 30 minutes, and to limit their cumulative duration, ideally to 5 hours per day”, estimate Laurent Kerangueven and Kévin Desbrosses. “However, sitting work should not be banned completely and should be replaced entirely by standing work, for example, because the latter can lead to other health problems in the long term (circulatory insufficiency, back pain, etc.)”, they detail.
“It is the alternation between different working postures that is to be favored to combat the risks linked to sedentary postures. There is no ideal posture, the ideal is to vary the postures!” they conclude.
According to a recent survey In France, more than one in five adults spends more than seven hours a day sitting.