Too much time sitting and watching TV is taking years off your life expectancy, a study says.
Simply put, the time we all spend sitting or watching TV is taking years off our life
expectancy.
Researchers arrived at the conclusion from the results
of five studies that explored the effects on nearly 167,000 people of
sitting and watching television.
Peter Katzmarzyk, the study’s lead
author and a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in
Baton Rouge, La., said “…the study doesn’t establish a direct
cause-and-effect relationship between sitting, TV watching and death.
But the evidence suggesting an association between shortened lives and
sedentary activities, like TV watching and driving, is piling up”
There
also seems to be something about sitting itself that is bad for one’s
health. Studies in both animals and humans have found that sitting leads
to changes in resting glucose levels and blood pressure, and that lots
of sitting bumps up levels of certain biomarkers of cardiovascular
disease and cancer.
“The
take-home message is clear: we may not know exactly why sitting is bad
for you, but if you reduce the amount of time spent sitting, there are
real health benefits,” the researchers said.
Katzmarzyk said since
many people spend at least eight hours each day sitting at a computer,
the workplace is an ideal place to start looking for ways to reform
behavior. People can get up
to talk to colleagues instead of emailing them, or spend a few minutes
of their lunch breaks taking a short walk.
And of course, a good place to start making changes is by squeezing the recommended 30 minutes of exercise into every day.
So, stop sitting all the time, engage in activities, stand up, move your body and be lively *winks*
