For many, working in an office is a slow death, the soulless commerce of turning time into a monetary amount of equal or lesser value. But in another, more real sense, office jobs are actually killing you. Sedentary behavior, like sitting at a desk for eight-plus hours a day, has been linked to an increased risk of developing several chronic diseases.
Coffee, on the other hand, is about as close to the exact opposite as you can get. It’s quick, it’s energizing, and it’s been shown to have all manner of healthy benefits. So what happens when the unstoppable force of coffee meets the unmovable object of the office job? Well, coffee wins. A new study finds that desk workers who drink coffee are linked with living longer than their non-coffee counterparts.
As reported by Daily Mail, the new study, published in the journal BMC Public Health, is the work of researchers from Soochow University, who analyzed 10-plus years’ worth of data on over 10,000 US adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. For the survey, participants would self-report daily sitting time and well as their daily coffee consumption.
Of the 10,639 participants in the study, 945 died during the follow-up period, 284 due to cardiovascular disease. With these outcomes, the researchers found that sitting for over eight hours a day was associated with a 46% higher risk of all-cause mortality and 79% higher risk of CVD-related death. Whereas those who drank coffee, especially in the higher quartile of consumption, were 33% less likely to die of all-cause mortality and over 50% less likely due to CVD. In joint analysis, the researchers found that non-coffee drinkers who sat for six or more hours a day were 158% more likely to die than coffee drinkers who sat for six or less hours daily.
Researchers believe that it may be due to the antioxidant properties of coffee that are leading to their findings.
So while quitting the office job to run unencumbered through the wilderness may not be readily available to all business casual workers, coffee is. And you may be stuck in that chair, forced to the turn very wheel used to grind your bones into a fine powder, coffee may be able to offset at least a little bit of the auto-osseoparticulation.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
