Americans may add as many as two years to the nation’s life expectancy if they can stand up more often and watch fewer hours of television, a study found.
While studies have shown that too much time sitting and watching TV are bad for a person’s health, today’s research in the journal BMJ Open is the first to show how reducing sedentary behaviors may increase life expectancy in the U.S., now about 78 years, said Peter Katzmarzyk, the lead author.
“It’s about the inactivity in your muscles,” Katzmarzyk, a professor of epidemiology at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “When you’re sitting your legs are completely inactive.
‘‘It’s not just about getting physical activity in your life. Just because you’re doing 30 minutes of physical activity, what about the other 23.5 hours,” he said. “Don’t just sit the rest of the day.”
For those who work in an office setting, standing during meetings, walking over to a colleague’s desk rather than sending an e-mail and getting up as often as possible are a few ways to keep the muscles in the body active, he said.
Reducing sitting time to fewer than three hours a day may add two years to U.S. life expectancyand cutting TV viewing time to fewer than two hours a day may extend life by about 1.4 years, according to the study, which analyzed previous research.
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