Sitting Too Long Can Kill You, Even If You Exercise
class=”zn-body__paragraph speakable”>Take a movement break every 30 minutes, say experts. No matter how much you exercise, sitting for excessively long periods of time is a risk factor for early death, a new study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine found.
There’s a direct relationship between time spent sitting and your risk of early mortality of any cause, researchers said, based on a study of nearly 8,000 adults. As your total sitting time increases, so does your risk of an early death.
The positive news: People who sat for less than 30 minutes at a time had the lowest risk of early death.
Sitting Too Long Can Kill You, Even If You Exercise
“Sit less, move more” is what the American Heart Association encourages all of us to do. But this simplistic guideline doesn’t quite cut it, said Keith Diaz, lead author of the new study and an associate research scientist in the Columbia University Department of Medicine.
“This would be like telling someone to just ‘exercise’ without telling them how,” Diaz wrote in an email.
Exercise guidelines are precise, he explained. For example, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adults do moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for two hours and 30 minutes every week, plus muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days a week.
“We need similar guidelines for sitting,” said Diaz.
“We think a more specific guideline could read something like, ‘For every 30 consecutive minutes of sitting, stand up and move/walk for five minutes at brisk pace to reduce the health risks from sitting,’ ” he said, adding the study “puts us a step closer to such guidelines,” but more research is needed to verify the findings.
Aging means more sitting
To understand the relationship between sedentary behavior and early death, Diaz and his colleagues at Columbia, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and other institutions turned to the REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) project, a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
