As IF Times

link Is Sitting For Long Hours At Work The New Smoking? « CBS Pittsburgh.

In most of the animal world, babies of all species are subject the cruelties and harshness of nature right from birth.  If they can manage to make it past the initial dangers posed by predators during  infancy, then they graduate to the regular garden variety of lifetime dangers of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

Humans are seen to be somewhat isolated from nature’s vicissitudes due to their perch on top of the food chain.  It turns out that there are many, many more dangers lurking which threaten their mortality beyond the unlikely scenario of being eaten by predators.  One of the most pervasive dangers rampant in mainly western societies is “iuris infestatione”, Latin for excess lawyers.  Oddly, a close second is “stultus research”, or stupid research, which results in dumb reactive behavior by the naïve majority.

Once somebody figured out that wearing a lab coat and getting funding from a University automatically legitimized esoteric studies, dangers to mankind of all sorts have been revealed.  It’s a wonder anyone makes it to retirement age.  We are all familiar with the dangers that are claimed to be posed by eating certain kinds of foods.  At various times in history, it has been accepted wisdom that such as coffee, eggs, butter, milk, white bread, red meats and bacon are bad for you.  Bacon.  As if.  In many cases, years later, they reverse their opinions.  At the moment, eggs are back to the good side again.

As of now, it’s popular to eat seaweed (ok kale, but it’s still seaweed) nuts, berries and legumes.  What are we, Silverbacks on the Serengeti?  But that’s not enough.  Other dangers lurk beyond food types.  Actually almost anything that’s fun to do is apparently fraught with danger according to the lab coat brigade.  Listening to loud music is not good.  Drinking hard liquor, smoking, sitting too close to the TV, staying up late,  too much sun, too little sun, too much water, too little water, eating poutine, playing with guns, motorcycling, cliff diving, sleeping too little, sleeping too much; you get the idea.  For a more thorough list of iffy things, have a look here:

sneer stuff

And now, according to a new groundbreaking study, even sitting too long is a health hazard.  It’s dawning on people that they are essentially running the gauntlet of death from the time they are first able to walk by doing…anything!  The worst part of these imagined dangers to life are when you see the convergence of “stultus research” with “iuris infestatione”.  This is usually facilitated by Politicus dufus. This is the truly dangerous combination resulting in expensive and stupid rules to govern people’s activities.  We can easily imagine a new tax on chairs in order to make them so expensive that people can’t afford to sit.  We can foresee a time when sitting is so marginalized as an acceptable behavior that they will be forced outside of buildings to do so.  Joining the throng of smokers at the entrance to office buildings will be people in chairs openly risking condescending sneers from non sitters.  Who knew that La-Z-Boy is the equivalent of Philip Morris?

We’re not really sure how long people can be expected to live if they were somehow able to manage to avoid all the hazardous activities of a normal life.   We’ll have to sit and think about that.