Official News page 5

REAL LIFE NEWS: STAND UP FOR HEALTH

by Hazed

We all know that exercise is good for you and makes you healthy, but a new study shows that it’s not just lack of exercise that is a killer – it’s sitting down all day.

The study examined questionnaire data given by over 220,000 people who were aged 45 or older, and compared it to mortality data from the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages for 2006 to 2010.

The conclusion is a bit of a worry for all desk-bound people like me: if you spend more than 11 hours a day sitting, then your chance of dying in the next three years is 40% higher than those who don’t sit down for so long. Even if you only sit on your butt for 8 hours a day, your death chance goes up by 15%.

Big caveat here: 40% sounds like a big number, but 40% of what? It all depends what the baseline chance of dying in the next three years is. If it’s one in a hundred then a 40% increase is a huge concern, but if it’s one in a million then a 40% increase doesn’t make a massive difference.

Anyway, back to the report... The study reports that the dangers of sitting are not just related to a sedentary lifestyle and obesity. They hint there are more profound physiological issues involved with sitting still for so many hours each day, because that means the body is deprived of many internal triggers that spark beneficial actions in the body.

Even standing up a few more times each day would be beneficial and improve your health, so finding an excuse to move away from the computer monitor every hour or so looks like a very good idea.

I’ll go and put the kettle on.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/27/sitting_down_is_killing_you_45_and_up_study/

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page