More of us than ever are working from home and ordering what we need online, wedding us ever more closely to our computers. And while Americans were sitting too much before, it’s only gotten worse. While there’s nothing wrong with sitting per se, sitting in the same chair hour after hour actually changes body chemistry for the worse, increasing insulin resistance, blood sugar and triglycerides. Since these changes are linked with diseases like heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, dementia and cancer, and even to earlier death, sitting has been called “the new smoking.” Many people try to counteract the negative effects of too much sitting with a daily walk or run, or going to the gym after work, but although these forms of exercise are helpful in reducing the negative effects of sitting (and have their own additional benefits), they are much less effective than getting up out of your chair every 15 minutes or so and moving around a bit. Former N…

Sitting Kills, Moving Heals is the title of a book by exercise physiologist Dr. Joan Vernikos. Her argument—one that has been confirmed by other scientists in a new field called “inactivity physiology” is not that sitting is necessarily bad for us; just that we spend far too much time doing it. The real problem is inactivity. Or put another way, it’s the absence of moving against gravity in a variety of ways throughout the day. Moving in opposition to gravity stimulates certain cell functions we need to be healthy, and we need to move frequently throughout the day. An hour at the gym after work won’t cut it. Dr. Vernikos became an expert on the physiological effects of gravity while working with NASA, where she observed the health-damaging effects of weightlessness on astronauts. Living in a gravity-free environment, she says, accelerates the aging process by about ten times. Changes in muscle and bone and other detrimental physiological changes that ordinarily occur in one ye…