Sit Less For a Healthy Life

The evidence is overwhelming and crystal clear: avoiding sitting is a key component of a health-promoting lifestyle. According to Dr. James Levine, co-director of the Mayo Clinic and the Arizona State University Obesity Initiative, some 10,000 publications have shown that sitting is harmful to your health. He was one of the first to bring attention to this controversial subject, and even wrote a book about it called "Get Up!: Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It."

Prolonged sitting actively promotes dozens of chronic diseases, including obesity and type 2 diabetes. Even more remarkable, this holds true even if you're very fit and exercise regularly. It's also an independent risk factor for an early death even if you lead an otherwise healthy lifestyle. In fact, chronic sitting has a mortality rate similar to smoking.1 And, the less you exercise, the more pronounced the detrimental effects of sitting become. Research also shows that your risk for anxiety and depression rises right along with hours spent in your chair.

Standing for One-Fourth of Your Day Reduces Your Risk of Obesity

We can now add yet another paper to the growing list of studies demonstrating the health effects of sitting versus standing. Published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, this study2^,3 examined the relationships between standing time, obesity, and metabolic syndrome, alongside and independent of exercise.

A total of 7,075 healthy adults of both sexes between the ages of 20 and 79 were included, and the results revealed that:

·       Men who stood up for a quarter of the time (about six hours) each day or more had a 32 percent lower risk of obesity

·       Men who stood up for about half the day had a 59 percent reduced likelihood of obesity

·       In women, standing a quarter, half, and three-quarters of the time each day was associated with a 35 percent, 47 percent, and 57 percent lower risk of obesity respectively

Exercise PLUS Standing Decreases Your Risk of Metabolic Syndrome

Moreover, those who regularly stood up and met weekly exercise guidelines also had a lower risk of metabolic syndrome, compared to those who either did not meet exercise guidelines and/or sat down most of each day.

Among regular exercisers there was a clear dose-response relationship between the amount of time they stood up and their risk of obesity and metabolic syndrome, which led the authors to conclude that:

"Standing a quarter of the time per day or more is associated with reduced odds of obesity. The inverse relationship of standing to obesity and metabolic syndrome is more robust when combined with health-promotingleisure-time physical activity...

Clinicians and public health practitioners should consider encouraging patients to achieve the physical activity guidelines and increase standing time for chronic disease prevention."

Standing Six Hours a Day Reduces Risk of Obesity by One-Third

November 20, 2015   Mercola.com

In Health, 

Dr. Niewierowski