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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Why People Should Sit Less? Numerous diseases including heart disease, stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and even certain kinds of cancer are related to modern people’s unhealthy lifestyle like eating too much fatty foods and less physical activities. Most people are less active because they spend too much time sitting or watching television. People in the United States of America (USA) spent an average of 5 hours watching television, as revealed by a study published in the June 2011’s issue of the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’. Another recent study also reported that American adults spend about 7.7 hours per day engaged in sedentary behavior. In a paper published on 9 July 2012 in the journal ‘BMJ Open’, researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Centre and Harvard Medical School reported that adults might extend their life expectancy by 2 years if they sit for fewer than 3 hours a day. They also found that reducing television viewing to less than 2 hours a day could similarly extend the life expectancy by 1.4 years. The aim of that study was to determine the impact of sitting and television viewing on life expectancy in USA. Data pooled from 5 studies involving almost 167,000 adults was combined with figures drawn from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which were used to determine the amount of time American adults spent sitting and watching TV.
Analysis found that sitting less would cut premature deaths by 27 percent in USA, while spending fewer hours in front of television might lower premature death by 19 percent. Such findings indicated that long hours of sitting and viewing television might have raised the likelihood of reducing the life expectancy in USA. Several previous studies have already associated extended periods of sitting or watching television with diabetes and death from heart disease or stroke. One of these studies showed that every 2 hours of television viewing would raise the risk of Type-2 diabetes by 20 percent, risk of cardiovascular disease by 15 percent, and risk of early death by 13 percent. Some physiological studies have confirmed that when a person is sitting, the leg muscles are completely inactive, which will cause problem in handling the blood sugar and cholesterol. While other health experts found the new study interesting, some did doubt that sitting all day in the office would simply lower a person’s life because a person’s life span is determined by individual actions such as weight, diet, and health and whether he or she smokes together with many other factors. As recommended by the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, adults should get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week. But the problem is even if people can stick to the guidelines, they can still be very sedentary or sit a lot. Hence, it is necessary to have a significant shift in behavior change at the population level in order to make noticeable improvements in life expectancy. In the meantime, there are many ways to help people reduce sitting time. For instance, standing more at work, having walking meetings, going to see someone in the same office rather than e-mailing, limiting television time, and having more active/less sedentary activities on weekends. According to researches, their study was not comparing people who were sedentary with those who are active. Instead, it looked at USA as a whole. Meanwhile, the study was based on association rather than on causes. The findings did not prove that sitting more was the cause of earlier death. More importantly, the findings could not be applied to other countries as they used only population in USA, and should not be taken to mean that people who are less active would die earlier. They also hope that more studies should be conducted in future to determine how many hours of sitting are bad for people’s health and how to reduce sedentary behavior.
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