Let’s get out of a sedentary lifestyle

 

By Saya Norm

 

EXERCISE or physical activity is not only good for your well-being but prevents chronic diseases. On the other hand, a sedentary lifestyle is a totally separate variable and seriously bad. Sitting too much – all by itself – can raise the risk of disease and premature death. Even if you dutifully do exercise, it can’t compensate for the bad effects of a long time sitting.

 

Today, many well-educated health enthusiasts do exercise, but they are also more likely to have desk jobs. It is not strange that most of our parents or grandparents pushed us in our childhood to get well our education for good office positions. We were brainwashed that desk job shows the high status of work life. That is why we got chronic diseases even under the umbrella of good exercise.

 

There are so many studies to prove the harmfulness of long sitting. One of them is a large American study on over 200,000 healthy adults in 2012. This study showed that more time spent sitting was linked to premature death from heart disease and cancer. Even among people who exercised more than seven hours a week, watching.

 

TV for more than seven hours a day was linked to a fifty per cent greater risk of all-cause mortality and a two-fold greater risk of cardiovascular mortality.

 

People who sat for eight hours a day and got almost no exercise had higher mortality rates than people who sat less and were very active. But the good news was that sitting for eight hours a day was not associated with higher death rates if they did 60-75 minutes of hard exercises every day. Sedentary behaviour is not just the absence of physical activity, but a distinct behaviour with its own health risks. Anyhow, sitting kills.

 

In science, sedentary behaviour is defined as any waking behaviour characterized by energy expenditure less than or equal to 1.5 times the resting metabolic rate while sitting or reclining position. That is different from physical inactivity, which is defined as not reaching the recommended 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise. In fact, physical inactivity is believed to be the biggest public health problem of the 21st century. It also causes as many deaths a year globally as smoking. A sedentary lifestyle not only raises the risk of getting many chronic diseases but increases the severity of these diseases and the risk of dying from them as well.

 

Sitting triggers a cascade of unhealthy metabolic events. It tends to increase visceral fat. Such fat is not an inert blob of tissue, as one thought, but an active organ. It pumps out chemicals that lead to chronic systemic inflammation and Insulin resistance, in another word, type 2 diabetes is a result of chronic inflammation. And also atherosclerosis (hardening of the artery), cancer, heart problems and neurological degeneration follows.

 

A sedentary lifestyle is also linked to high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, gallstones, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cognitive dysfunction, dementia, osteoarthritis, low back pain, constipation, muscle weakness and so many others. Perhaps the most important one is heart disease. Sitting too much raises the risk of cardiovascular disease. The more prolonged the sitting, the bigger the risk.

 

As a matter of fact, sitting more than ten hours a day increases levels of a protein called troponin, a marker for damage to cardiac cells that are normally seen in a heart attack. Sitting too much also raises the risk of blood clots. In consequence, the clots may cause stroke or cardiac arrest by a coronary blockage. Physical inactivity, including sitting, is so lethal. It now accounts for an estimated 5.3 million deaths worldwide, according to a Landmark 2012 study. That’s nine per cent of premature death, six per cent of coronary heart disease, seven per cent of type 2 diabetes, ten per cent of breast cancer and ten per cent of colon cancer.

 

If inactivity were decreased just a bit, by ten or 25 per cent, more than 1.3 million deaths could be averted all over the world. The cost of an inadequate activity is also very expensive. Even in a developed country like the United States, 11.1 per cent of healthcare expenditures were associated with inadequate exercise.

 

Worldwide, an analysis of 142 countries showed that physical inactivity costs a whopping $53 billion in 2013.

 

Now, you have some knowledge of a sedentary lifestyle. Don’t be afraid. You may be able to offset those bad consequences with somewhat activity. Even just standing – not exercising, but simply not sitting – would reduce premature deaths from all causes. And for those who are very busy exercising, replacing just minutes of sitting every hour with a bit of moving like going to the bathroom or drinking water helps mitigate the risk of sitting. Or else, don’t sit for more than thirty minutes continuously.

 

Do you want a long healthy life or a short sickly life? It depends on your own decision.