Go to the gym all you want. But the evidence is mounting that even the most herculean workouts won't save you from a sedentary day at the office. (We're talking heart attacks, persistent pudginess, even, um, rectal cancer.) Here's how to emancipate yourself from your desk chair—and live a lot longer
In the annals of science, the correlation between sitting on your ass for a living and having generally poor health is unlikely to be recalled as a great breakthrough. And yet a recent report saying essentially just that landed on the front page of The New York Times and sparked a conflagration of similar stories around the world, prompting newscasters to report, from their rollie chairs, that we might be sitting ourselves to death on the job.
The deal is this: Scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, a Louisiana-based research facility that focuses on all things related to fat-assed-ness, linked America's obesity epidemic to a precipitous loss of "active" jobs—any vocations that require you to move more than your fingers and eyeballs. Their methodology was simple. The team, led by Timothy Church, M.D., assigned intensity values to various jobs and, using employment data beginning in 1960, watched as those labeled "moderate intensity" (farming, making stuff) plummeted while sedentary jobs (mine, yours) skyrocketed. They figured that the average American man now burns 140 fewer calories per workday than his farming and factory-working forebears, and then asked a mathematician to figure out how this would translate into weight gain. And whaddya know? The resulting estimate was nearly identical to the average weight Americans actually gained over the same period.
In effect, the work of Church and his crew—subsequently linked to a growing body of data about the hazards of sedentary life—helped expose a potentially huge scientific blind spot. For years we've assumed that as long as we meet the basic requirements for exercise (twenty minutes a day, three times a week), we'd be fine. But here's the problem: In the past two decades or so, the overall level of exercise among Americans hasn't really changed, while our waistlines have ballooned. Many scientists explained this collective inflation of our pleated trousers by looking at our diet—Big Macs and Big Gulps—but Church's group introduced a new and scary possibility: The doughy roll around your middle has as much or more to do with what we're doing, or not doing, at work.
We were warned that this could be a problem. The first study on workplace torpidity appeared back in 1953, when a Scottish scientist named Jerry Morris showed that bus conductors, who moved around a lot, had fewer heart attacks than the drivers, who sat all day. Drivers, he found, had noticeably higher rates of heart disease than conductors, despite coming from the same social class and otherwise leading the same kinds of lives. They were twice as likely to die of a heart attack.
When I traveled to meet Church and his colleagues at Pennington, a campus of low-slung tan buildings populated by hundreds of people in lab coats, epidemiologist Peter Katzmarzyk clarified Morris's work. The Scotsman was indeed ahead of his time; he just didn't fully understand his results. It wasn't merely the activity of the conductors that made them healthy but the inactivity of the drivers that made them unhealthy. In other words, much in the same way that running 10Ks won't save a smoker from lung cancer, going to the gym isn't going to save you from your desk job.
The root of the problem, Katzmarzyk told me, is that our body is based on a blueprint drawn up in a world before desk chairs: "If you think about our hunter-gatherer existence, the whole drive was to capture as much energy from the environment with as little effort as possible." If early man chased a chipmunk for two hours, the resulting calories wouldn't make up for those burned in the process. To compensate, he got smart. He built traps. Conserving energy, Katzmarzyk says, "is what our physiology is designed for. We're still very efficient. We're designed to store energy." Which, because we don't expend as much of it anymore, is one reason we're fat.
According to Katzmarzyk, our metabolism was optimized for our Stone Age ancestors, who had to stalk and kill (or at least forage) for lunch. We modern men need only dispatch an assistant to meet the Quiznos guy in the lobby—we have to work (much) less hard to find (much) more abundant food. Scientists use the term "energy efficiency ratio" to measure this calories-in, calories-out relationship, and it's been calculated that today's human acquires 50 percent more food per calorie burned.
For an accelerated example of what happens to us as we go from active to sedentary, scientists observed Inuits in northern Canada from 1970 to 1990 and saw remarkable deterioration in physical conditioning as they stopped hunting seals and started eating Cheetos. Closer to home, Ye Olde Amish have stubbornly stuck to tradition. The average Amish man takes upwards of 18,000 steps a day. Those of us chained to desks are lucky to top 5,000.
Three guys (you may have heard of them) who don't sit on their asses all day 
Donald Rumsfeld • "I've used a stand-up desk steadily since 1969. I have one at home and one at the office. I don't know about any health benefits; I just get more done standing up. It works. Oh, and when folks drop by the office to raise a question, if you're standing up, the meetings tend to be shorter."
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) • "They should call it sitting—not running—for office. So I make a concerted effort to make my duties as active as possible. In parades, I'm always running up and down. I don't fight for the front parking spot—I park in the middle and walk in. I'll get up and talk to my employees at their desks. None of those things alone are the solution, but it all adds up."
Mikhail Prokhorov, Nets Owner • "I don't use a computer, but that doesn't mean I'm not stuck at my desk. So I have a little gym in my office, and when I have time, I kickbox. I move just to keep the blood flowing. I also ask my colleagues to train with me. We do martial arts."
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