Doctors are urging the millions of people who work at a desk all day to stand up or walk around the office.

As CBS 2′s Dr. Max Gomez reported, our couch-potato lifestyle is killing us at about the same rate as smoking.

And it’s not just sitting around at home; it’s also our sit-for-hours workdays that are part of an unhealthy sedentary lifestyle.

“Sitting is probably killing me,” said Linda Caufield, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Caufiled is right. A number of studies have shown that prolonged sitting is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and even early death.

“Smoking certainly is a major cardiovascular risk factor, and sitting can be equivalent in many cases,” said Dr. David Coven, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. “The fact of being sedentary causes factors to happen in the body that are very detrimental.”

A recent study shows levels of physical activity and lower levels of sitting time were positively associated with excellent health and quality of life.

The obvious solution is to exercise more, but busy lifestyles and a common aversion to exercise make it hard to compensate for hours of sitting at a desk.

The good news, said Dr. Dermont Phelan, of the Cleveland Clinic, is “that doesn’t mean that we have to go to the gym for 30 minutes in the day. Just a brisk walk, and we don’t have to do it continuously. Even doing 10 minutes three times a day will work.”

While not an equal substitute for exercise, some doctors recommend getting up once an hour from your desk, even if it’s just to walk around briefly or go to the bathroom. Some people have even started using combination treadmill desks at work — anything that contracts our muscles and gets blood flowing.

“It dampens down inflammation,” Phelan explained. “It dampens down the risk of depositing plaque in the coronary arteries.”

Sitting At Work For Hours Can Be As Unhealthy As Smoking « CBS New York

That figure, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. As all the research shows, we Brits are fatter and heavier than ever before in history, with one in four of us now classified as obese (a BMI between 30 and 40) – a figure which has more than doubled in the last quarter of a century – while a further third are overweight (a BMI between 25 and 29).

It’s not only our BMIs that are on a dangerous upward curve. Waistlines are expanding too, especially as we get older, when metabolic rate slows and body fat accumulates. Recent figures show that 30 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women aged 60 to 70 having a waist size of 102cm/40 inches and 88cm/34.5 inches respectively.

Corpulence has always been with us of course, although in former times it was associated with the rich. The lower classes, fed mostly on bread and jam with maybe a few scraps of meat on Sundays, tended to be weak and scrawny – as was noted with some alarm by officials sizing up recruits for the Boer War, in the first systematic measurements of height and weight ever undertaken.

Why is Britain fatter than ever? – Telegraph