Sitting is the new smoking.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that long periods of sedentary activities — eight hours a day or more — can double the rate of heart disease and diabetes, raise cancer risk by 13 percent, and increases the risk of premature death by 17 percent.
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Sitting for more than eight hours a day can take years off your life, just like smoking does, News 6 partner FLORIDA TODAY reports.
Normally we burn three calories per minute during activities like walking. This slows to one calorie a minute when we sit. Meanwhile, sugar, triglycerides and bad cholesterol levels build up. Muscles atrophy, bone mass decreases and oxygen efficiency drops.
Researchers recommend standing or walking at least two hours during the work day with the ideal being four hours of sitting and four hours of other activity. Sit and stand desks, treadmill desks, and walking meetings are part of the solution.
We know that exercise is the most efficient medicine that we have. There is no medication on the face of the earth that can do what exercise does. Not only does exercise lengthen your lifespan, it lengthens your health span. People who exercise regularly have 10 more years of health compared to less active people.
If exercise is medicine, what is the dose? Traditionally, that has been 30 minutes a day, five days a week of moderate exercise. That's 150 minutes a week or two and a half hours. (Most of us balk at that, yet we can easily spend two and a half hours a day in front of a TV or computer screen for entertainment.)
Exercise efficiency is measured in METs (Metabolic Equivalent of Task). A MET is defined as amount of energy expended during a specific physical activity. One MET (1 kcal/kg/hr) is roughly the amount of energy we expend at rest.
Walking two miles per hour, a leisurely pace, is the equivalent of 2.5 METs. A brisk walk of four miles per hour equals 4.5 METs. Jogging at six miles an hour rates 10 METS.
Now let’s put them together for something called MET minutes — how many minutes a week you spend at a certain level of METs. If you spend 60 minutes a week with an activity level of 2.5 METs, you have done 150 MET minutes. But if you spend 30 minutes a week at an activity level of 4.5 METs, you have done 135 MET minutes — almost the same return in half the time.
A recent study looked at older people and compared their physical activity levels and their risk of dying from any cause over a 10-year period. Seniors who started an exercise regimen — even an extra few METS per week (1-499 MET minutes) — reduced their risk of death by 22 percent during the study compared to those who did not exercise.
My favorite demonstration of the damage of inactivity was the 1966 Dallas Bed Rest and Training Study. The researchers recruited normal healthy 20-year-olds and measured their muscle mass, cardiac function, bone mass, body fat and overall stamina. Then they put them to bed for three weeks and when they retested them, they learned that the subjects were now normal healthy 40-year-olds. Essentially, the young men aged almost seven years each week.
So get moving. Remember Newton’s law of inertia from physics class, “A body at rest remains at rest, a body in motion remains in motion.”