Prolonged Sitting Boosts Bad Health

Your sedentary lifestyle could be affecting your health negatively, and even simple activities such as walking out to get your mail or moving around periodically, could reduce your risk for disease, researchers have discovered.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that men and women who have desk jobs or who spend inordinate amounts of time on their couch are at a higher risk of illness than those who move their muscles periodically in some fashion.

Muscle movements and contractions may play a role in affecting important blood fats, and this establishes some connection between prolonged sitting and bad health, although the connection is still a bit tenuous.

The researchers suggest that it’s important to identify what “sedentary behavior” really is. Rather than being defined as a failure to exercise, it should be considered its own separate class of behaviors, including prolonged sitting, which promotes a lack of whole-body muscle movement. These bad behaviors are unrelated to the lack of exercise and can automatically raise your risk of heart disease. For example, a woman’s chance of metabolic syndrome, which is an early indicator of diabetes and heart disease, can increase more than 25 percent for every extra hour in front of the television.

Researchers urge physicians to focus on simple, non-exercise activities such as using stairs, walking, and taking breaks during sedentary periods, as a way to help men and women avoid additional heart disease risks.