Don't Blame Sitting—Yet—for Shorter Lives of the Sedentary

As a follow up to our post back in July regarding how sitting can be dangerous to your health, the WSJ makes a good point that it may not be the act of sitting that is so dangerous but rather than the people who sit  tend to be inactive or unhealthy.

See WSJ article here

• The study that led to the news accounts cautioned that no such conclusion could be drawn from the available research. Sitting studies haven't yet fully gotten off the ground, thanks to technological, cost and ethical limitations. Yet the evidence so far all points in the same direction: that sitting more is tied to higher mortality.
• But that doesn't mean the act of sitting itself is deadly. Instead, it could be that people who spend more time sitting are less healthy to begin with, or that those who sit less are using that time in healthier ways such as exercising.

• Figuring out all these variables "is where the science needs to go now," said Peter Katzmarzyk, lead author of the headline-generating sitting study published last week by the online medical journal BMJ Open, and associate executive director for population science at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. "We only have the epidemiological evidence."