Who would have thought that a comfortable desk job, habitual TV watching and social media scrolling could be so dangerous? I realized that sitting all the time is not the natural way for humans to live.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego suggest that sedentary behavior is one of the biggest causes of premature death. Older women who sat for more than 11 hours each day had a 30 percent increased risk of death, even if they were doing strenuous exercise.
Researchers found that whether women participated in low or high amounts of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity ultimately did not matter when combined with excessive sedentary activity. It is said that he did. Any form of exercise has been shown to increase your risk as long as you sit for long periods of time.
“Even if you walk briskly for an hour for a long time, even if you sit for the rest of the day, all the negative effects on your metabolism accumulate,” said study co-author and professor at the Herbert Wertheim School at the University of California, San Diego. says postdoctoral researcher Steve Nguyen. He is a doctor of public health and human longevity science.
While this is an alarming conclusion, Nguyen used an impressive sample size for his study. The researchers studied up to 6,489 women (aged 63 to 99) who were fitted with monitors that displayed measurements of time spent sitting and daily activity. They followed the participants for eight years and monitored whether any of the women died.
This data was originally collected from a large, long-term national project called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), which began in 1991 and is still ongoing. This report is the first to use a newly validated machine learning algorithm (called CHAP) to analyze the relationship between total sitting time and length of sedentary activity and risk of premature death.
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“Sedentary behavior is defined as waking behavior that involves sitting or lying down with low energy expenditure,” Professor Nguyen said in a university statement.
“Sedentary behavior is generally unhealthy because it slows muscle contraction, blood flow, and sugar metabolism.”
“When you sit, blood flow slows throughout your body, reducing glucose uptake. Your muscles contract less, which reduces the amount of oxygen they need to consume to move them, which slows your pulse rate. ”, explains Dr. Jayla Mohammed, a cardiologist at the Aga Khan University Hospital. Mohamed was not part of the research team.
So what should you do if you’ve been sitting for too long? Nguyen says not all sitting positions are the same.
“If you sit for more than 11 hours per day, and depending on how long you sit in a single session, your risk starts to rise. If you sit for more than 30 minutes at a time, The risk is higher than if you only sit for 10 minutes. Most people can’t wake up six times an hour, but some may wake up once an hour or every 20 minutes. You don’t have to go anywhere, just take a short walk,” Nguyen recommends.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
