Could Simply Changing Your Chair Add Years to Your Life?

The profound difference between sitting and ‘active resting’

Photo: Image Source/Getty Images

Note: Although I’m an academic researcher, because I too suffered from back pain for quite some time, so I’m hardly a disinterested researcher. I went so far as to invent a mechanism to allow sitting to be active, and I’m the CEO of a company (QOR360) created to popularize and sell chairs that encourage active sitting. This conflict of interest disquiets me (Richard Feynman observed: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest to fool.”), but seems unavoidable.

An article with the startling title “Changing the Way You Sit Could Add Years to Your Life” was published recently in the prestigious journal New Scientist. The title makes an extraordinary claim which, if true, will change the everyday lives of most of us. But, as Carl Sagan once observed, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The senior author on the paper is David Raichlen, a prolific researcher in the biology department at University of Southern California (USC) who has spent his career understanding how humans came to require exercise for optimal health, and how our current sedentary existence is undermining our health and…