You may know that exercise is good for your heart, but did you know that sitting is actually bad for your cardiovascular health? Scientists from the University of Texas analyzed data from 2,223 Americans who answered questions for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Their research shows that sedentary behavior such as reading, watching television, driving or sitting in front of a computer is an important factor in determining cardiovascular fitness. It isn’t just that people who are sitting are not exercising. It seems that sedentary activities all by themselves contribute to heart disease.
Another study, this one from Spain, suggests that TV viewing is especially pernicious. More than 13,000 young adults were followed from college graduation for eight years. Those who spent three or more hours daily watching television were twice as likely to die prematurely as those who watched much less TV. An equivalent amount of time spent driving did not have the same deleterious effect on survival.
These results seem quite discouraging, but there is a bright spot. A prospective study from the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, found that fitness moderates the effects of sitting. In other words, men who exercise enough to stay fit, even if they sit, are less likely to suffer the serious consequences seen in the other studies.
[Mayo Clinic Proceedings, online July 7, 2014; Journal of the American Heart Association, June 25, 2014; Mayo Clinic Proceedings, online July 14, 2014]
The People’s Pharmacy perspective on this one is pretty straightforward: don’t watch more than three hours of TV daily! It also seems that regular exercise, even if it is not a perfect antidote to a job that keeps you sitting in front of the computer for hours at a time (as ours do), is still worthwhile.
