Your body's big enemy? You’re sitting on it - Health - Fitness - NBCNews.com. Sitting too much may double your risk of dying, study shows - HealthPop. Young business woman sitting on chair with a briefcase at the office lounge iStockphoto (CBS News) Need a health boost? You might want to start with getting up from your couch or computer desk. PICTURES: 20 most sedentary cities in America According to a study in the March 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers discovered that people who sat for 11 hours a day or more were 40 percent more likely to die - from any cause. The researchers also found the odds of dying were 15 percent higher for those who sit between eight to 11 hours a day compared to those who sit less than four hours a day. Researchers relied on self-reported data from 22,497 individuals 45 years or older from the 45 and Up study, the largest look at aging in the Southern Hemisphere.
"The evidence on the detrimental health effects of prolonged sitting has been building over the last few years," study author Hidde van der Ploeg, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney, told HealthDay. Stand against sitting disease: Expert offers ideas for moving more. You probably won't find it in medical dictionaries, but a problem that has come to be known as sitting disease is rampant in the USA.
The term captures how many people are glued to their seats for hours at the office, in their cars and in front of the TV. Government statistics suggest that almost half of us report sitting more than six hours a day; 65% say they spend more than two hours a day watching TV. But it's taking a toll on health. A recent study showed that if people spent less than three hours a day sitting, it would add two years to the average U.S. life expectancy. And research has linked sitting too much to increased risks of diabetes and death from cancer, heart disease and stroke. STORY: Sitting less could extend your life Endocrinologist James Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., talks about sitting disease and how to get out of the chair and move more.
Q: Some people sit most of the day. Q: How can people change their mind-set? A: Yes. Get Up, Stand Up, For Your Life: Can Standing Desks Fight Sitting Disease? SBRN. Sitting too long could cause cancer. More than 90,000 new cancer cases a year in the United States may be due to physical inactivity and prolonged periods of sitting, a new analysis shows. The analysis, being presented today at the annual conference of the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) in Washington, D.C., cites about 49,000 cases of breast cancer and 43,000 of colon cancer. "This gives us some idea of the cancers we could prevent by getting people to be more active," says epidemiologist Christine Friedenreich of Alberta Health Services in Calgary, Canada.
Calculations are based on U.S. physical activity data and cancer incidence statistics. "This is a conservative estimate," she says. "The more physical activity you do, the lower your risk of these cancers. " Alpa Patel, an American Cancer Society epidemiologist who looked at the data, says the numbers "seem like very reasonable estimates.
" In a study of 123,000 people, she found that the more time people spent sitting, the higher their risk of dying early. Sitting All Day Is Worse For You Than You Might Think. Video: A Crash Course In Beating The Cubicle Trap Yes, exercise is good for you. This we know. Heaps of evidence point to the countless benefits of regular physical activity. Federal health officials recommend at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise, like brisk walking, every day. Studies show that when you adhere to an exercise regimen, you can improve your cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure and improve metabolism and levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. But now, researchers are beginning to suspect that even if you engage in regular exercise daily, it may not be enough to counteract the effects of too much sitting during the rest of the day. Epidemiologist Steven Blair, a professor of public health at the University of South Carolina, has spent 40 years investigating physical activity and health.
"Let's say you do 30 minutes of walking five days a week (as recommended by federal health officials), and let's say you sleep for eight hours," Blair says. —Eliza Barclay Dr. Health: Staying Active. Do you lead an active lifestyle or a sedentary one? The question is simple, but the answer may not be as obvious as you think. Let's say, for example, you're a busy guy who works 60 hours a week at a desk job but who still manages to find time for five 45-minute bouts of exercise. Most experts would label you as active. But Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., has another name for you: couch potato. Perhaps "exercising couch potato" would be more accurate, but Hamilton, a physiologist and professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, would still classify you as sedentary. "People tend to view physical activity on a single continuum," he says. Hamilton's take, which is supported by a growing body of research, is that the amount of time you exercise and the amount of time you spend on your butt are completely separate factors for heart-disease risk.
But it's not just your heart that's at risk from too much sitting; your hips, spine, and shoulders could also suffer. The Most Dangerous Thing You'll Do All Day. We stand around a lot here at Men’s Health. In fact, a few of us don’t even have office chairs. Instead, we write, edit, and answer e-mails—a lot of e-mails—while standing in front of our computers. All day long. Why? It all started last summer, when Assistant Editor Maria Masters came across a shocking study in the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (one of dozens of research journals we comb each month as we put together the magazine).
That’s right—I said 54 percent! Masters immediately called the lead researcher at Pennington, a professor named Peter Katzmarzyk. Here’s the most surprising part: “We see it in people who smoke and people who don’t,” Katzmarzyk told Masters. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much you exercise or how well you eat. Bonus Tip: For the latest health, fitness, and nutrition tips and advice, check out our all-new Today's News channel! This raised a rather obvious question: Why? Still sitting? 1. 2. 3. So what’s a desk-bound worker to do? The Danger of Sitting Still - The Juggle. Prolonged bouts of sitting increase cancer risk. Inactivity Is Harmful, Even With Trips to the Gym. Sean Marc Lee/Getty Images Many of us sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and then go home and head for the couch to surf the Web or watch television, exchanging one seat and screen for another.
Even if we try to squeeze in an hour at the gym, is it enough to counteract all that motionless sitting? A mounting body of evidence suggests not. Increasingly, research is focusing not on how much exercise people get, but how much of their time is spent in sedentary activity, and the harm that does. The latest findings, published this week in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicate that the amount of leisure time spent sitting in front of a screen can have such an overwhelming, seemingly irreparable impact on one’s health that physical activity doesn’t produce much benefit.
The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. “This is excessive,” he said. Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? The Men Who Stare at Screens. David De Lossy/Getty Images In 1982, researchers affiliated with the Cooper Institute in Dallas surveyed a large group of well-educated, affluent men. The researchers were interested in the men’s exercise habits, but they also asked, almost incidentally, about their indolence. Specifically, they inquired about how many hours each day the men spent watching television or sitting in a car. (This was before you could do both at once.) Over the years, the survey’s main results were used to reinforce a growing body of science about the health benefits of regular exercise.
But the information about the amount of time the men spent being inactive remained largely unexplored. Most of us have heard that sitting is unhealthy. The amount of time that most Americans spend being inactive has risen steadily in recent decades. The physiological consequences are only slowly being untangled. Regular workout sessions do not appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting. Sitting: 6 New Reasons It's Bad For Your Health.
Consensus is not always an easy thing to come by in the health and wellness worlds, but if there's one topic that inspires seemingly little debate, it is sitting. As in, on your duff. And how it's not great for us, health-wise. Which is why after a year of robust research on the potential health consequences of sitting too much, we've compiled a list of the latest and greatest reasons why the chair -- at least when inhabited for long periods of time -- may not be your friend. Of course, we understand that for many, ditching that seated pose is not an option. (Really. We're desk-bound over here, too. Better yet? Loading Slideshow.