SAN DIEGO — Who knew a Netflix binge or cushy desk job could be so hazardous? Researchers from the University of California-San Diego suggest that avoiding sedentary behavior (like sitting down all day) may be the secret to a longer life. Older women who sat for 11.7 hours or more daily saw their risk of death jump by 30 percent – even if they exercised vigorously!
It’s an alarming takeaway, but study co-author Steve Nguyen, a postdoctoral fellow at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, used an impressive sample size for his work. His team examined time spent sitting and daily activity measurements collected from monitors worn for up to a week by 6,489 women (ages 63 to 99). Researchers also tracked the participants for eight years, monitoring if any of the women died.
That data was originally collected during a study led by Andrea LaCroix, Distinguished Professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health. It’s a larger long-term national project called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), which began in 1991 and is still ongoing today. This report is the first ever to utilize a novel and validated machine-learned algorithm (called CHAP) in order to analyze the relationship connecting total sitting time and length of sedentary activity with the risk of premature death.
“Sedentary behavior is defined as any waking behavior involving sitting or reclining with low energy expenditure,” Nguyen says in a university release. “Previous techniques for calculating sedentary behavior used cut points that identified low or absent movement. The CHAP algorithm was developed using machine-learning, a type of artificial intelligence, that enhanced its ability to accurately distinguish between standing and sitting.”
Exercise ‘incapable’ of reversing the damage
Fine-tuning “sitting” helped Nguyen separate and better assess total sitting time and usual sitting bout durations. Sedentary behavior, in general, isn’t healthy because it lowers muscle contractions, blood flow, and glucose metabolism.
“When you’re sitting, the blood flow throughout your body slows down, decreasing glucose uptake. Your muscles aren’t contracting as much, so anything that requires oxygen consumption to move the muscles diminishes, and your pulse rate is low,” Prof. LaCroix explains.
Unfortunately, and rather surprisingly, exercise appears incapable of reversing these negative effects. According to researchers, whether women participated in low or even high amounts of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity ultimately proved inconsequential if paired with excessive sitting; all patterns of exercise showed the same heightened risk if they also sat for long hours.
“If I take a brisk long walk for an hour but sit the rest of the day, I’m still accruing all the negative effects on my metabolism,” Prof. LaCroix continues.
So, what can you do if you sit too long?
“The risk starts climbing when you’re sitting about 11 hours per day, combined with the longer you sit in a single session. For example, sitting more than 30 minutes at a time is associated with higher risk than sitting only 10 minutes at a time. Most people aren’t going to get up six times an hour, but maybe people could get up once an hour, or every 20 minutes or so. They don’t have to go anywhere, they can just stand for a little while,” Prof. LaCroix recommends.
Notably, Nguyen also says that not all sitting is the same.
“Looking beyond conditions like cardiovascular disease, we start thinking about cognitive outcomes, including dementia,” the researcher explains. “There are cognitively stimulating activities that can result in sedentary behavior, like sitting while studying a new language. Is sedentary behavior in that context overall bad for a person? I think it’s hard to say.”
Nguyen recently received a National Institute of General Medical Sciences K99 award entailing 12 months of mentored research focusing on protein signatures tied to physical activity and how they relate to dementia. Prof. LaCroix, meanwhile, while sympathetic to the challenges of changing sedentary behavior once habits set in, also stresses that the modifications are frequently necessary.
“We’ve created this world in which it’s so fascinating to sit and do things. You can be engrossed by TV or scroll on your Instagram for hours. But sitting all the time isn’t the way we were meant to be as humans, and we could reverse all of that culturally just by not being so attracted to all the things that we do while sitting,” Prof. LaCroix concludes.
The study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
You might also be interested in:
- 10,000 steps really could keep you from an early death — especially if you’re sitting all day
- Sitting Disease: Can 30 Minutes of Exercise Daily Save Your Life?
- Is the ‘pedal desk’ the future for offices? Contraption could put end to sedentary jobs
- Best Standing Desks: Top 5 Healthy Work Setups Most Recommended By Experts
A useful distinction would be that between sitting with the legs dependent and sitting with the feet elevated on an ottoman or in a reclining chair. The feet up posture should reduce sympathetic tone.
So in view of this study…making children sit in a boring classroom all day long, while in many cases removing recess as well, is basically criminal negligence.
Female software engineer here. 30 year career. Sat for 8-10 hours a day. Made a point to get up and walk around a lot. Often did housework, no exercise, for 3-4 hours once I got home. Still kickin’ at 68. What makes me different? Would like to know more about the outliers in the study.
JavaScript and Mongo DB kept you young and healthy!
I wouldn’t call you an outlier, you’re just not dead yet.
Reading between the lines of this article, if you’re 68 with a 30 year career of sitting 8-10 hours a day, the fix is already in, it’s too late!
Best to just enjoy what you have left.
Kickin at 68 is average. How you are at 85 is what they are talking about.
Why dont you highlight the actual study so it can be reviewed with your article?
Yet my father died two months ago (12/26/23) at 102. He sat on a trading desk for 35 years during the day. Sat in a big comfortable chair every night and watched TV from 1949-2023. He had bacon, eggs and fried potatoes for every day for breakfast and ice cream for dessert every night.
Oh…. he also hadn’t had a lick of exercise since D-Day.
Explain that!
Thats the thing about science today. It is no longer in pursuit of the truth. It bends to human will.
My condolences on your loss.
There may be reasons to doubt this study, but the existence of outliers like your Dad is not one of them. Outliers happen in every study. But, they might be worth more study. Something very hardy about your dad, apparently, that is perhaps a rare quality, and maybe more could be learned from people like him.
I was with you until your disturbing last sentence.
Bailey is right…especially that last sentence
Your sentence is much more disturbing…
There was a guy who was 90 something (close to a 100) I think. He said he ate food like your father, sausages, eggs, potatoes, peas, and they even did a story on him showing the food he ate, and he drank a little merlot with it and he looked fine and young for his years. I don’t recall seeing wrinkles on him either.
It’s mainly all in the genes, folks. Some of us will live to be old and some of us not. And there’s not a thing we can do about it. Carpe diem.
72 stopped lifting weights because of backpain.
walk or do stretches planks an hour a day.
feel like crap,all the timeand fatigued.
over weight by 20lbs.
Trying to learn microcontrollers and tinkercad ,so sit at least 3 hrs a day.
had a stress test again and i m still in the top half of my age group for good fitness.
They even told me “you must work out a lot” while doing the test.
Go figure
Let’s not forget about the correlation between sitting and hemorrhoids too.
I’m retired, fifty pounds overweight, love fatty foods, sit mostly throughout the day and hate to exercise. I am in perfect health… ALL my body parts work quite well…and I’m 84.
What say ye?
People who are already dying need to sit more.
People I don’t like should sit more..
I think the study authors need to look at other human societies and those in the past. It seems to me that many people in many cultures around the world throughout history spent much of their life sitting.
sleep,exercise,no drugs, reading, don’t live in the toxic city, spend time outside
In the article sucks says most articles are do. It gives a laundry list of things that could possibly be wrong with you but I don’t see where it specifically tells what people are dying from I sitting all day. Kafka
So the takeaway is that if you MUST sit 10 hours a day, don’t waste your time exercising. I put zero credence in this study. Women sit more than men, yet live longer than men. This obviously means that you can extend your life by sitting more. See how that works?
I am quite certain there was a major study a few months ago at odds with this result…that exercise offsets the effects. Can’t quickly find it now.
Next we should learn to sleep standing up
Science today is a joke. It starts with a preconceived notion rather than a Hypothesis, and then eliminates anything that goes against the preconceived notion.. Anyone who disagree’s or even proves that the preconceived notion is total bunk is called a “Denier”. Global Warming, turned into “Climate Change for that very reason and when you got down and dirty on the subject, you found there was a lot of money to be made in claiming, not proving it existed.
I take almost anything I hear now with a grain of salt because I don’t trust people with greedy intentions who claim they have the science to back it up. Especially after Fifty years of watching as someone else comes along and claims the exact opposite backed by science!
Ok, I take the Bible as history: We were designed for a completely different environment. The Great Flood drastically changed the atmo, the plant life.. “science” is chasing their tail with wrong assumptions about origins.
Pre-Flood: “Our sun burned with the healing fires of carbon, allowing LOOONNNGGG lives.”
Post-Flood: We were so wet, NO fires could be started for WEEKS!! Humans ALMOST bottlenecked out of existence.
“Our Suns now burns with a disintegrative metal fire”. (radiation?)-even the SPIN of electrons around EVERY SINGLE ATOM in the universe “flipped”….
Has anybody yet dared to speculate that perhaps our mind might link health and longevity to promises from Biblical scripture which might just perhaps alter the landscape of the perceived test results and their interpretation? Would this not beg for alignment with a more meaning study when those whom are baptized and with presence of faith, be separated from the well intentioned but unbaptized?