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Is slouching as harmful for health as smoking? Experts answer
Updated On: 25 August, 2024 09:06 AM IST | Mumbai | Aastha Atray Banan
It’s official. Thanks to all the tech we use, slouching is now an epidemic. Erectile dysfunction, poor cognitive function, and cardiovascular diseases are just some of the maladies awaiting you if your back doesn’t straighten up
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Illustration/Uday Mohite
IF you were taking sly solace in the fact that you don’t smoke, and hence may be slightly healthier than the smoker in your office, we are here to burst that bubble. It’s highly possible that you slouch—bend over your desk or phone—if you are sitting for long periods of time… and it could be as bad as smoking. If you are sitting, ergo slouching six to eight hours a day, research says it increases chances of cancer, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and back pain. “Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV, and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death,” is what James Levine, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, told LA Times in an interview, and it’s been haunting us since. “The chair is out to kill us.”
In the US, thanks to Beth Linker—medicine and disability historian and author of Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America—slouching has been declared an epidemic. She calls it a “widespread social contagion of slumping that could have deleterious effects upon individual health, and the body politic”. In fact, when archaeologists and natural scientists began connecting the evolutionary relationship between Homo sapiens and other primates in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they asked the question what came first: Upright walking or higher cognition? The dominant view was that the evolution of the human brain preceded the development of bipedalism, leading some to wonder whether problems such as flat feet or scoliosis, were, in effect, the price of braininess.
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