Extended Sitting: You Might Want to Stand Up for This
The 'sedentary lifestyle' is one marked
by an absence of any regular exercise. So
listen up couch potatoes, hardcore gamers,
and extended-hours office workers, because
the following is a statistic that,
ironically enough, if you were standing
might knock you off your feet:
The average person now spends 9.3 hours a day sitting. People who sit for six or more hours per day are 40 per cent more likely to die within 15 years compared to someone who sits less than three hours a day. This is according to data compiled by Medical Billing and Coding, a U.S.-based organization.
If you're amongst those of us who spend most of their day at half height in some seated environment, you know that the modern workforce is a quickly growing army of bent knees.
Research into activity levels in
correlation with our health has been going
on for decades, and there have been hundreds
of studies done to that effect. The lacuna
in the scientific body of evidence is found
when one tries to focus on what happens when
we don't do things like exercise—or even
just stand up and get the blood flowing.
"We’re talking extensively and producing public health messages about what we don’t do. And we don't talk at all about what we do do: We don’t move very much, but we do sit idle," says Dr. Mark Tremblay, director of healthy active living and obesity research at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute.
Research into this area started in 2006 when a group of Canadian scientists published commentary in the Canadian Journal of Public Health calling for research into sedentary behavior of Canadians. As of 2011 there is still insufficient information into the nature of sedentary behavior, but the year marked a major turning point with the launch of the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology's sedentary behaviour guidelines for children and youth. In addition to this, the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine was dedicated to the topic of sedentary behavior; the Journal of Applied Psysiology followed this up in October with the a dedication of the same theme. In September, Dr. Tremblay and his team launched the Sedentary Behaviour Research Network, a first of its kind that has so far connected more than 100 researchers from around the world.
In analyzing the studies on sedentary behavior we find some rather alarming conclusions. The act of simply sitting down for extended period of time can lead to complications including several types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity and Type II diabetes.
“There have only been 10 studies that have been published on sedentary behaviour and cancer risk, and most of them have only been published in the last one to two years.” Conversely, there have been over 200 studies done with regards to activity levels in the same time period.
Perhaps the most tall-standing result to come out of this body of research is that people who go running in the morning before coming to a job or situation where they sit down for 8 hours may not actually be any more less at risk than those who do not run at all before sitting down for an extended period of time.
Researchers do not know what intervals, or the manner in which exercise should be used to moderate the amount of time spent sitting down.
“Over the next 25 years you’ll see a ballooning of this type of research,” Dr. Tremblay assures us.
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