14 thoughts on “New public health threat: Chairs”

  1. imho on average, given a not too extreme lifestyle, you die when your genetic clock stops ticking. 80+ yr olds were known from ancient history onwards.

  2. Even people who are markedly overweight seem to have generally similar health outcomes compared to people closer to a BMI of 25, say. Some of the apparent exceptions may be “confirmation bias”, e.g. Robert Griffin, the clearly obese actor who played Vernon Dursley and who died of heart trouble recently. But similarly heavy people sometimes live into their 90s, like Winston Churchill did.

  3. It does seem possible that a lot of people are indulging in sloth. As Gamecock notes, though, that’s more our doing than the chair’s doing.
    Physical activity seems to help my sense of physical well-being. Perhaps, though, people who are less active than me are physiologically geared to less activity than I am.
    At any rate, the less physically-active workplace is in general a less dangerous one. When we use pallet jacks, we get fewer hernias. When we use hoists, we drop less stuff on each other. When there are fewer miners underground, an accident exposes fewer to injury or death.
    The World War II “Bluejackets’ Manual”, the textbook of Navy basic training, had a line: “…lean, hard men attend the funerals of fat men.” But stats don’t back this up all that well.

  4. So that’s why my kids are blinking hard in my direction.
    Chairs are very dangerous. I’ve fallen out of them numerous times laughing at expert scientific and political commentary.

  5. Heh. Haven’t we all fallen over backwards once or twice? I guess that’s where our intuition about tipping points comes from.

    The first ever office chair that I bought with my own cash had a plastic tag stapled to its bottom that read, “For one person only”. I wonder what that was supposed to mean.

  6. I fell twice over backwards with my leanback deckchair. It made my wife laugh but still it was bloody dangerous so you’re not far wrong there. Chairs are killers in that sense

  7. The most dangerous aspect of a chair, is falling out of one. Big settlements have been made when employees were injured by falling out of old, worn, damaged or otherwise defective office chairs (note that modern office chairs have 5 “legs” for the rollers than the old, less stable chairs with 4 legs).

  8. The first credible one in a long time. But it’s not sitting that is harmful; it is sitting only and/or sitting wrong. The present workplace ergonomics has a lot of junk science in it, and the public tends to follow it without questioning.

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