Health security

The lure of computers means Americans are sitting more than before

Despite the growing alarm about the harmful effects of sitting too much, Americans are sitting more than in the past — in part because people are spending more leisure time in front of the computers.

The association between lots of sitting and bad health is now well-established, but there hasn’t been a lot of data on how sedentary Americans actually are, says Yin Cao, a cancer epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. By analyzing data from the National Health Nutrition Examination Survey, Cao and her team found that, for both adults and teens, the total time sitting increased by about an hour per day from 2007 to 2016 (from about 6.4 hours to 8.2 hours a day).

The amount of time spent sitting and watching television or videos was generally stable between 2001 and 2016 — at least two hours a day — but as time went on, people in all age groups reported spending more of their leisure time sitting while using the computer. By 2016, half of adults reported doing this for at least an hour a day, up from 29 percent in 2003. This was true for 57 percent of teens, up from 53 percent.