Sitting all day at work increases mortality risk by 16%

The evil of our era is a sedentary lifestyle. While our ancestors hunted, farmed, or herded livestock, today many jobs are done in a chair, plus free time watching TV, playing video games, or using a cell phone on the couch.

According to various studies, Americans spend about 9 or 10 hours a day sitting, and in older adults this time increases to 12 hours. And in Spain the situation is not much better. Almost four in ten people admit to being sedentary in their free time, and 62% spend more than five hours sitting every day.

Against this backdrop, dozens of studies have been conducted to determine how a sedentary lifestyle affects the body, some of which even compare inactivity to smoking. One was published in The Lancet with data from hundreds of countries and concluded that sedentary lifestyles are responsible for 5.3 million deaths a year, slightly more than tobacco, which is linked to 5.1 million. There are now more sedentary people than smokers, making tobacco more deadly.

Another study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, concluded that for every hour spent watching television, life expectancy was shortened by 22 minutes, and smokers reduced the time they spent smoking each cigarette by an average of 11 minutes.

Comparing sedentary lifestyles and smoking is a “shocking” way to highlight the former problem, but the mechanism behind each of the two bad habits is different, says Maribel Marmol, president of the Association of Nurses (AEC). Now, “both increase mortality and the risk of serious illness, so they are equally important for public and individual health,” he elaborates. In fact, tobacco, through its toxins, affects the respiratory and cardiovascular systems and other organs, while the saddle effect affects the metabolism and circulatory system, as well as at the muscular level, but “the result is the same” from the body’s point of view. “countless health risks and reduced life expectancy,” the specialist concludes.

The study, published in the scientific journal JAMA, followed nearly half a million people over 12 years and concluded that those who worked while sitting most of the time had a 16% greater risk of mortality and a 33% greater risk of cardiovascular disease. diseases. than those who work on the move.

Daniel E. Lieberman, an expert in the field of evolutionary biology, summarizes three main problems in the book “Exercise.” “The first has to do with what we don’t do while we’re sitting,” which is movement. The second is “with an increase in the concentration of glucose and lipids in the bloodstream.” And third, and “most concerning,” is the possibility that the immune system attacks the body due to sedentary lifestyle through a process known as inflammation. Chronic inflammation “damages tissue in the arteries, muscles, liver, brain…” and is associated “with numerous diseases associated with aging,” such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, some types of cancer, or arthritis. .

According to Lieberman, the comparison of a sedentary lifestyle to tobacco smoking is “exaggerated” because “sitting is older than Methuselah, but the problem is not the fact of sitting itself, but the hours and hours during which we remain motionless, inactive. “, to which we must add performance with little or no exercise.

And there’s more bad news: an hour at the gym doesn’t erase the negative effects of sitting for the rest of the day. A comprehensive study of 240,000 Americans published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that exercise reduces, but does not eliminate, the risk of death associated with a sedentary lifestyle.

“Sitting time cannot be compensated. Spending so many hours causes changes in physiology, and breaking a sedentary lifestyle is the only way to prevent it from leading to poor health,” says Cesar Bustos, a member of the Spanish Society for the Fight against Obesity and an expert on physical activity.