What's the secret to adding two years to your life? It's simple actually. Exercise and eating healthy is a given, but a new study has found that sitting less than three hours each day can give you those precious extra two years.
A new analysis published in the British Medical Journal suggests that the life expectancy of the entire U.S. population could increase if Americans simply spent more time sitting, whether it be at a work desk or lounging on the sofa watching a guilty pleasure, be it sports or Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
"Sitting is a risk factor, not a disease," study author Dr. Peter Katzmarzyk, said study researcher Peter Katzmarzyk, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., according to WebMD. "It's comparable to obesity, and it's almost to the level of smoking. We need to turn that around and engineer sitting out of our lives."
U.S. adults spend, on average, between 4.5 and five hours a day sitting down, a significant shift in the population's behavior would be needed to have an effect on life expectancy, Katzmarzyk said. This might be achieved through changes at the workplace, such as the use of standing desks, and by watching less TV, he suggested.
The team of researchers reached this conclusion by looking at the results of five studies that explored the effects on nearly 167,000 people of sitting and watching television. They combined this data with national data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how much time Americans report sitting and watching TV.
Those estimates were used to calculate the number of deaths associated with sitting down, leading researchers to conclude that restricting sitting to fewer than three hours a day could tack on two more years of living. They also found cutting television viewing to less than two hours each day could lead to a 1.38-year gain in longevity.
About 27 percent of deaths in the studies could be attributed to sitting, and 19 percent to television viewing, the researchers said. Evidence suggesting an association between shortened life span and sedentary activities, like TV watching, working at a desk and driving, is piling up. For example, a 2010 study found that the mortality rates were 25 percent lower for people reporting the most physical activity compared with those reporting the least.
Time to get more mobile and add more exercise into your schedule by doing simple things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, standing up and walking around at the office every 30 minutes to keep active.
