Over
the years the one thing I have found to be true in life is that things
are never as simple as we would like them to be. Just a few years ago if
someone asked you if lived an active lifestyle, you knew that if you
worked out for 30 to 60 minutes a day 4 to 6 days a week you could
answer “yes.” If not, you said “I’m working on it.” For decades
scientists have studied the relationship between how much we exercised
and our exercise levels and health. But in the past five years, some
scientists began looking at this correlation from a different
perspective: Instead of thinking about what exercise does for the body, researches started to investigate what sitting for long periods of time does to the body. This was some seriously unconventional thinking.
Rather than looking at what we weren’t doing they started to look at what we were doing,
which was a heck of a lot of sitting. In fact, by some estimates many
people are sitting as much as 12 hours a day. This new perspective has
begun to turn the science of sedentary studies on its head. Researchers
from such diverse fields as epidemiology, molecular biology,
biomechanics and physiology are seeing more data that is leading them to
believe that the amount of sitting we do on a daily basis may not only
be making us very sick, it could be causing us to die prematurely. The
most disturbing revelation is that 30-60 minutes of sustained exercise
may have little or no positive affect on a sedentary lifestyle. To put
it simply, sitting for extended periods of time may be slowly killing
you, and just working out after sitting around all day may not be enough
to save you.
The
fact that sitting around is bad for you isn’t very surprising; you
would have to be living under a rock not to have heard that doing
nothing for long periods of time could make you fat and unhealthy. But
most of us thought that if we hopped on a treadmill or took a spin class
or shook our groove thing in a Zumba class a few times a week, we’d be
cool. But according to microbiologist Marc Hamilton from the University
of Missouri we need to adjust our thought process. “People need to
understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely
different from walking or exercising…Sitting too much is not the same as
exercising too little. They do completely different things to the
body.”
This
subject has been thrust into the national spotlight with a new
Australian study that looked at death rates over a three-year period.
The study concluded that people who spent a lot of time sitting at a
desk or in front of a television were more likely to die sooner than
those who were only sedentary a few hours a day. Of more than 200,000
adults age 45 and older, the lead author of the study Hidde van der
Ploeg and his colleagues at the University of Sydney found that people
who reported sitting for at least 11 hours daily were 40 percent more
likely to die during the study than those who sat less than 4 hours
daily.
The
results appear in the Archives of Internal Medicine, March 26, 2012,
and reveal that the link between too much time sitting and shortened
lives stuck even when they accounted for how much moderate or vigorous
exercise people got, as well as their weight and other measures of
health.
Another
study released in July of 2012 showed that an analysis of five large
studies that followed about 2 million people in several different
countries lead by Peter Katzmarzyk of Louisiana State Universities
Pennington Biomedical research Center found that the life expectancies
of people who said they spent more than three hours a day sitting were a
full two years less than people who spent less than three hours sitting
daily. Maybe even more surprising was that this was true regardless of
whether subjects reported getting the recommended amounts of exercise or
not.
In a 2005 article in Science magazine,
Dr. James A. Levine, an obesity specialist at the Mayo Clinic, gave his
insights into why, despite similar diets, some people are fat and
others aren’t. “We found that people with obesity have a natural
predisposition to be attracted to the chair, and that’s true even after
obese people lose weight,” he says. “What fascinates me is that humans
evolved over 1.5 million years entirely on the ability to walk and move.
And literally 150 years ago, 90% of human endeavor was still
agricultural. In a tiny speck of time we’ve become “chair-sentenced,”
Levine says. This “chair sentence” as Levine puts it may very well be a
death sentence.
So
what’s the big difference between sitting and standing, you ask? I mean
just standing around seems every bit as lazy as sitting, doesn’t it?
Hamilton knows better. “If you’re standing around and puttering, you
recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never
tire,” he says. “They’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them
for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.” One
enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, sucks fat and cholesterol from the blood
stream, and burns the fat for energy while shifting the cholesterol from
LDL (the bad kind of cholesterol) to HDL (the healthy kind of
cholesterol). When you’re sitting, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme
activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to hang out in the
bloodstream. After a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol drops
by 20%. Amazingly this is just one of the myriad of chemical changes
that take place in the body while we sit. Sitting for extended periods
of time has a huge cascade of effects on the body, everything from back
pain and restricted blood flow to being implicated in an elevated risk
of certain kinds of cancer. Let’s take a look at what this new research
really has to say.
Sitting
for extended periods of time is as bad for your health as smoking
cigarettes. And exercising for 30-60 minutes a day isn’t enough to undo
the damage from extended periods of sitting. Is Your Chair Killing You
reveals shocking new research showing that sitting for long periods
greatly increases your risk of developing obesity, heart disease,
diabetes, stroke and cancer. Our bodies were designed to move constantly
over the course of the day, but most of us sit for hours a day at work
and at home! Fitness and wellness expert and award-winning author Kent
Burden has created brief, simple movements you can incorporate into your
daily life to combat the damaging effects of sitting. These simple
movements, done standing for 1-5 minutes each hour will burn calories,
energize and refresh you, and you won’t even break a sweat; you’ll even
improve your back pain. This book is a how-to for weight loss and
disease prevention. Read this book–you’ll be healthier in as little as 8
minutes a day.
Nominated for the Dan Poynter Global Ebook Awards and won honorable mention at the Los Angeles Book Festival
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Non-Fiction
Rating – G
More details about the author
Website http://www.kentburden.com/
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