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Researchers say excessive sitting increases your odds of dying from heart disease
Every hour you spend sitting in front of the television may raise your risk of a premature death due to heart disease by as much as 18 percent, a new Australian research suggests.
The problem is not with the program shown on TV; it is the time spent sitting while you are watching.
Lead researcher David Dunstan, said that this study offers another evident association between too much sitting and dying from diseaase.
The findings of this research have grave implications for Americans and Australians upon consideration that apart from sleeping, “watching television is the behavior that occupies activity of four hours viewing a day," added Dunstan, who is also head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria.
What is good to know is that research demonstrated that moving the muscles several times throughout the day is one of the best methods of controlling weight and providing protection against disease, Dunstan continued.
He went on to note that we have the tendency to take too lightly the significance of “incidental, non-sweaty activity throughout the day” when we are either awake or engaging in exercise – the more movements you make, the greater the beneficial effects on health.
Dunstan stressed out that while it is true that obesity can contribute to these problems, even people of normal weight can have elevations in their blood sugar and cholesterol levels if they spend long hours sitting.
The report was published online Jan. 11 in advance of publication in a forthcoming print issue of the journal Circulation.
Dunstan and his fellow researchers gathered data on the lifestyle practices of 8,800 healthy men and women 25 years old and above. Apart from lifestyle practices, the researchers also checked the cholesterol and blood sugar levels of the study participants. Over a follow-up period of more than six years, 284 of the participants died – 87 of whom died from cardiovascular disease and 125 due to cancer.
The researchers divided the participants into three TV-watching categories: those who spent less than two hours per day watching; those who watched two to four hours per day; and those who spent more than 4 hours a day watching.
Every hour a day spent watching TV raised the risk of dying due to any cause by 11 percent, the researchers found. The increase in mortality risk for cardiovascular disease was 18 percent, while that for cancer was 9 percent. Participants who spent at least four hours a day watching TV had an 80 percent higher risk of an early death due to cardiovascular disease and a 46 percent higher risk of dying from any other cause than those who spent less than two hours a day sitting in front of the television.
Even after the researchers accounted for other cardiovascular disease risk factors such as cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, high levels of cholesterol, unhealthy diet, excessive weight and lack of exercise, the link between TV watching and dying was still evident.
According to Dunstan, even though the study was conducted in Australia, its findings can also be applied to Americans. Daily TV watching, on average, is estimated to be about three hours in Australia and the United Kingdom, and up to eight hours in the United States, where a lot of people suffer from either excessive weight or obesity, he said.
Dunstan said that what they are now trying to grasp is that the risks linked to inactive lifestyle are not essentially counterbalanced by performing more exercise.
"In other words,” he said, regardless of how much exercise you perform, if you sit watching television for four hours on a daily basis you still have a substantially increased risk of early death from all causes and a much greater risk of cardiovascular disease."
Experts were in agreement that to stay fit you have to keep moving.
According to Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a cardiology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, “regular exercise” has been consistently shown to cause an improvement in the health of the cardiovascular system as well as “lower risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and premature death."
Fonarow further said that minimizing time spent doing nothing may be beneficial in reducing the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and need to be taken “as part of a comprehensive approach to improve cardiovascular health."
A professor of health and exercise science at the University of Tennessee, David Bassett Jr., said that when one takes a look at “time trends in physical activity” over the past 100 years, “it is clear that people are doing more structured, purposeful exercise than before."
Nevertheless, the change that has been evident is that people are now spending less time walking, doing household chores as well as manual labor than in the past, Bassett said. He went on to explain that people are also “spending more time in sedentary activities like television watching, computer use and desk jobs."
Bassett said that this research contributes to an increasing pile of evidence “that the amount of time spent in sedentary activity, as distinct from the amount of time spent in purposeful exercise, can affect your health."
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