Europe’s champion sitters: Even sporty Dutch people fall victim to ‘chair use disorder’

The Dutch are seen as a nation of healthy giants, who hop on their bikes to cycle energetically across flat areas. But new research suggests they are in fact the “sedentary champions of Europe”, with sedentary lifestyles causing thousands of early deaths.

Health experts are calling for urgent action to stop the spread of so-called ‘chair use disorder’ across Western countries. a report from research organization TNO, which was published on Friday, has shown that too much sitting costs the Netherlands €1.2 billion per year and leads to 21,000 premature deaths per year due to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is riskier, researchers discovered, to be a lawyer than a truck driver.

“We are the European champions of sitting,” says cardiologist Leonard Hofstra, who made the call Excessive chair use is an addiction. “Sitting is bad for us because the blood flow stagnates. When you exercise, thousands of miles of blood vessels in your body generate a substance called nitric oxide – one of the healthiest substances imaginable. It dilates blood vessels, increasing blood flow, prevents bad cholesterol from worsening, prevents the formation of clots and inflammation: this is the impact of exercise on our health. So this is a very bad thing as a country.”

TNO believes that office sitting culture is harmful enough to pose an occupational hazard and is urging employers to take breaks, use standing desks and hold ‘walking meetings’.

“The Netherlands and Great Britain are comparable, although here in the Netherlands the percentage of people who sit more than eight hours a day is 64%, so almost two-thirds of our population is at risk,” says researcher Lidewij Renaud. “It is an individual problem, but also a social problem.”

The reason is not necessarily too little formal exercise, because the Dutch, unlike the British, are among the sportiest countries in Europe. It’s about what people do the rest of the time.

“We have these guidelines to be active at moderate to vigorous intensity for 30 minutes a day of the World Health Organization, but that is a very small part of the day if you are awake for 16 hours,” says Renaud. “We are not really aware of our sitting behavior. You’re not sitting on the couch, but watching your streaming service. You don’t sit at the table, you eat your lunch. You are not sitting at your desk, you are working and being productive. Only in the last fifteen years have we come to the conclusion that – oh my God! – it does matter what we do for the other fifteen and a half hours a day.”

In 2022, workers in the Netherlands spent an average of 8.9 hours per day, more than half of which were during working hours (and during an hour’s commute). Lawyers, economists and IT people are sitters eminently, 7.3 hours per day – even more than truck drivers with 7.2 hours. a Eurobarometer survey found that 26% of Dutch people over the age of 16 sat for more than 8.5 hours a day – well above the EU average of 11%. Reducing this number by a quarter could prevent 5,200 “seated deaths” per year, according to TNO, which based its calculations on British methodology.

The problem, linked to the predominance of service sector jobs, appears to have been exacerbated by increased working from home post-pandemic, plus technology – from home entertainment to super fast delivery services – send those essential items to your bank.

Earlier this year, the Dutch Sports Council urged the government to get people up more often. Erik Scherder, councilor and professor of neuropsychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, says that exercise also influences the brain. He invites his students to do three minutes of squats for every half hour of lecture.

“If children are at school all day and play (computer) games at home instead of playing outside, it is alarming,” he says. “The networks in your brain that are involved in motor functioning show a large overlap with the networks that are involved in mathematics and language comprehension. If you skip physical functioning, you really harm the development of your other functions.”