Death Sentence? Long Days Chained To Office Chair?

RedTracker| We could keep this post simple, just telling you that employees who regularly put in 11-12-hour days have an almost 60 percent greater risk of having a heart attack than those who work a more standard 7-8 hour day.

Researchers are attributing the problem to the stress that accompanies working that many hours in our demanding, modern lives.

“Overtime-induced work stress might contribute to a substantial proportion of cardiovascular disease,” said Gordon McInnes, a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, in an editorial also published in the European Heart Journal. via The Globe and Mail

Long Days Even Worse Chained To Office Chair

Business Week recently published Your Office Chair Is Killing You, writing that the human body wasn’t designed to spend endless hours sitting in an office chair.

“If you’re standing around and puttering, you recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never tire,” says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. “They’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.” One enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, grabs fat and cholesterol from the blood, burning the fat into energy while shifting the cholesterol from LDL (the bad kind) to HDL (the healthy kind). When you sit, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to camp out in the bloodstream. Within a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%. via Business Week

Honestly, we don’t know where these studies leave us.  If you’re young, perhaps becoming a horticulturist is in your future.