I rise today to defend the art of sitting. On second thought, I am not going to rise. I will remain seated.

You may not be aware of it, but sitting is under attack. I first heard of this when I received an email from a reader last week. He said he had just read an article in the AARP magazine to the effect that sitting is the new smoking.

He said that notion raised an interesting point. Is this good news to smokers who are forced to leave their desks and stand outside a building to smoke? After all, they are decreasing their sitting time. Are they perhaps better off than their nonsmoking colleagues who remain seated at their desks?

I mused about that for a moment and then forgot about it. The next morning, I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Wall Street Journal when I happened upon another anti-sitting article.

This story said that more and more businesses are opting for stand-up meetings. Instead of having a bunch of people sitting at a table, you have a bunch of people standing around.

Apparently, they get more done.

That seemed strange. Are people more efficient when they're less comfortable? Maybe they're in more of a hurry so the meetings are shorter and seem more productive.

But the reason behind the trend toward stand-up meetings is immaterial to this discussion. The fact remains that standing is being held up as superior to sitting.

Since when did sitting become a bad thing?

I went to the basement and sat in front of the computer. I came up with a couple of quick stories. Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic has been attacking sitting. His attacks seem rather mild. He wants people to occasionally get up from their desks and exercise.

Then there was Marc Hamilton, a physiologist at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Hamilton claims to have discovered that when he prevents lab mice from standing, an enzyme that burns fat gets turned off.

Another researcher claims that sitting six hours a day makes a person 40 percent more likely to die within 15 years than a person who sits less than three hours a day.

I am not sure how researchers figured that out, but let's assume that they are right. For the sake of argument, let's concede that excessive sitting is detrimental to one's health.

There are two issues here, I think.

First, many of us enjoy sitting. In fact, we prefer sitting to standing. Lying down might be even better, but it is less socially acceptable. The last time I laid down in the office, somebody tweeted about it. Like I had a problem. "I wonder what he had for lunch..."

Some of my fondest memories involve sitting. Some of the most meaningful conversations I've had occurred while I was sitting. But often, I sit by myself. Doing nothing.

It's a personal freedom thing. No secondhand sitting is involved. If I want to sit, why should anyone complain? This is America!

There is a second issue involved. Why do we want everybody to be so darned healthy? Do we want everybody to live to be 100?

When Richard Lamm was governor of Colorado, he was widely ridiculed for suggesting that elderly people had a duty to die. What he actually said was, "We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life."

That was in 1984.

What has happened since then? Medical technology has continued to improve. The pharmaceutical industry has continued to develop new drugs to keep us going.

Meanwhile, the baby boomers seem obsessed with health, and just as they approach senior citizen status, our programs for senior citizens are headed toward financial disaster.

I am not suggesting anybody has a duty to die.

If a person wants to eat brown rice and whole grains instead of something tasty, fine. If that person wants to drink green tea instead of pale ale, fine. If he wants to avoid sitting, fine.

I'm just not sure that it's in the best interests of society to encourage this healthful behavior. As far as medical spending goes, we spend a ton of money on end-of-life care whether the end comes at 65 or 95.

I think society would be better off if we encouraged tasty foods, not healthy foods. Enjoy yourself more and worry less. Quality of life counts as much as quantity. That would be a good message.

Or maybe we should have no message at all. I'd be fine with that. Instead, the message is always about making the healthy choice.

Now the professional scolds are going after sitting.

For everybody's sake, forget about them. Go ahead, take a load off. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Be happy.

After all, you are guaranteed the right to pursue happiness. That's in the Declaration of Independence. You think Thomas Jefferson was standing when he wrote that?