"Help! My Job Is Killing Me! Literally!"

Even if you view yourself as an active person, your job -- and your evening television habits -- may have a bigger influence on our ultimate health than we thought. Is your job contributing to your untimely death?

If you work in an office and you enjoy watching television when you get home in the evening, you may be killing yourself. And I'm not speaking figuratively, either. This may, indeed, be the literal truth.

Both activities have one common factor. Ironically, it's inactivity. More specifically, it's sitting (I see you jumping up out of your seat now to read this!)

The standard advice of getting 30 minutes of exercise daily may not be strong enough to combat what can be another 14 hours or more of sitting.

The study, from which these results were extracted, couched its conclusions in terms of watching television. The conclusion was that every hour of television viewing raised your chances of dying from a heart attack or a stroke by 18 percent. Each hour of television viewing additional increased your chances of dying from cancer by 9 percent and from other chronic health conditions by 11 percent.

The research was conducted by a team of scientists at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

Before you toss that television out the window, you need to know the television itself is not the enemy. It's the prolong sitting that causes the rates of death to rise, the researchers explain.

Listen to what the lead author of the study, David Dunstan, has to say about the adverse heart effects of sitting: "The default position for watching television is sitting. We now have evidence that too much sitting is bad for health, whether it is sitting on the couch in front of a television or sitting for long hours at the office desk."

This isn't the first study performed by the Institute to provide these results. Earlier studies found that extended hours dedicated to watching television were strongly associated with risk factors normally linked to heart disease: abnormal glucose metabolism, high triglyceride levels and the metabolic X syndrome.

What's more, these associations, the researchers say, were independent of exercise and socio-economic status.

Our bodies don't wear out. They rust away. At least that's the tentative conclusion of Suzanne Andrews, president of HealthWiseExercise.com

"When you lead a sedentary lifestyle, whether it be from watching television or sitting at the computer, your body is not challenged the way it was meant to be and this leads to premature death caused from Disuse Syndrome.

Hey, where are you going? Out for another walk? Good for you. Then what? Ah, perhaps a few fundamental exercise activities. See you in a half hour or so.

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