Just when you think you are getting a handle on your health, you are eating well, exercising regularly and keeping a positive outlook on life the medical community comes out with something else that you must be warned about.
The newest danger posed is sitting. When comparing the dangers of sitting to your health the healthcare community says it is just as dangerous if not more so than smoking.
Though the dangers of sitting have been discussed for years it is only in the last few months that it seems to have hit the mainstream media and has talked about on major news networks, published in news magazines, and talked about all over the world wide web.
So what do you need to know about the detrimental effect sitting can have on your health?
Here is the nitty-gritty from an article done by Dr. Joseph Mercola at www.mercola.com…
- Sitting for extended periods of time is an independent risk factor for poor health and premature death. Even if you are very fit, if you uninterruptedly sit for a great percentage of the time, you’re still at an increased risk of dying prematurely.
- Research by the NASA scientist responsible for monitoring the astronauts, shows your body declines rapidly when sitting for long periods.
- Simply standing up over 30 times a day is a powerful antidote to long periods of sitting.
- There are virtually unlimited opportunities for movement throughout the day, from doing housework or gardening, to cooking and even just standing up every 10 minutes.
- Sitting for long periods is bad for you; getting up often and interrupting your sitting is GOOD for you.
In the May 25, 2013 edition of the Los Angeles Times, Anup Kanodia, a physician and researcher at the Center for Personalized Health Care at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center said, “Sitting is the new smoking.” He cited an Australian study published in October 2012 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that compared sitting and smoking.
According to the study, every hour of TV that people watch, presumably while sitting, cuts about 22 minutes from their lifespan, while it’s estimated that smokers shorten their lives by about 11 minutes per cigarette.
http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=56575
I have a job in which I sit a lot. I do get up frequently throughout the day but still a lot of sitting. Dr. Mercola’s article states that it isn’t so much the act of standing that counteracts the ill effects of sitting, it is about the act of changing posture from sitting to standing that can have the most impact on a person’s health. It isn’t about standing for 20 minutes, it is about getting up 35 times during the day.
“The key point is to move and shift often, when your’re sitting down. Meaning, you want to interrupt your sitting as often as possible.”