"Don't Just Sit There"

That’s the title of an article in Sunday’s Times, which reports the baneful results of inactivity, particularly sitting (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/sunday-review/stand-up-for-fitness.html?_r=1.)  A National Cancer Institute study that followed almost a quarter million Americans over eight years was one of the studies that the article cited.  At the beginning of the study, none of the study’s respondents was suffering from diabetes, cancer, or heart disease.  After eight years, many were sick and many had died.  As might be expected, those who were most sedentary – defined as those who watched television for at least seven hours a day - had a higher risk of premature death than those who watched less often. 

What astounded me is that “people in the study who exercised for seven hours or more a week but spent at least seven hours a day in front of the television were more likely to die prematurely than the small group who worked out seven hours a week and watched less than an hour of TV a day.”  A new Australian study estimated that if an average man watched no television as an adult, his life span might be 1.8 years longer and a television-less woman would live another year and a half.  Watching television can be dangerous to your health. When the author of this article read these results she canceled her cable subscription.

My wife and I, who have just added seventy more channels, including two movie channels, to our cable subscription for a very small added fee, ought to follow suit except that we hardly ever watch television, cable or otherwise.  We like the idea, though, of being able to watch whatever and whenever we want.  It’s a bit like the feeling I had as a university teacher that, as my own boss, more or less, I could go to the movies in the afternoon whenever I wanted to, but in my entire career as an academic I never did it once.

But I digress.  The Times article also reported a study by researchers at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne that compared the effects of sitting completely still for seven hours and breaking up the sitting every twenty minutes by either walking or jogging for two minutes.  When the subjects sat without getting up, their blood sugar levels spiked and their insulin levels went haywire.  Blood sugar remained stable, however, when subjects broke up their sitting with walking or jogging.  Jogging didn’t improve blood sugar levels any more than standing.  “What was important, the scientists concluded, was simply breaking up the long, interminable hours of sitting.”

I’m probably like many of my readers in spending “long, interminable hours” at the computer.  I’ve long known that a sedentary life style is unhealthy, but I thought that my seven hours of exercise per week would shield me from its ill effects.  Now I know I was wrong.  So from now on I’ll try to rise from the computer every twenty minutes and walk or stand for two minutes.  I won't jog, however, since it would disturb the neighbors downstairs and besides I'm too lazy and old. 

My wife asked me what I’ll do with the extra minutes of life that breaking up my sitting might give me.  “I’ll do what I’m doing now,” I told her, “only I’ll be able to do it longer.”



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