Study: Sedentary living increases risk of disease, death

Melissa Chin, Senior Corporate Planner at UHN, works at a standing workstation. Photo: UHN News

Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 1:59 PM - Are you sitting down while you read this? Science says that's bad for you, and it looks like new research backs that up.

Sedentary living, when you spend a lot of your day sitting down whether at work or watching TV, is always frowned upon healthwise, but a new study says it increases your risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other ailments, even if you spend much of your downtime working out.

"Our study finds that despite the health-enhancing benefits of physical activity, this alone may not be enough to reduce the risk for disease," Dr. David Alter, one of the report's authors who is the senior scientist, Toronto Rehab, at the University Health Network (UHN) and Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, said in a release from UHN.

Taking regular exercise does decrease the risk of those ailments and cut down your chance of an early death, but not enough to completely reverse the effects.l

“Avoiding sedentary time and getting regular exercise are both important for improving your health and survival,” Alter says. “It is not good enough to exercise for 30 minutes a day and be sedentary for 23 and half hours.”

If you want to decrease the amount of time you spend sitting down at work or an home, lead author Avi Biswas, of Toronto Rehab, UHN and the Institute of Health Policy, had these tips:

• Monitor the moments in your day that you typically sit. By monitoring out behaviour, we’re more likely to change it.
• Evaluate these moments and think of ways you can replace sitting times with standing or moving times. For example, stand while having your breakfast cereal. Stand or walk around during tv commercials.
• Set small achievable goals and work up as you begin to achieve them. This help you build towards greater non-sitting targets over a longer period of time.
• Set an alarm to remind you to get standing if you sit for long periods of time. 

"I often use this while working at my sit-down desk," Biswas told The Weather Network. "There are also plenty of mobile applications which do this and help remind you to get up and get moving. You should try to aim for a 2 minute stand/stroll every 30-40 minutes.

The study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week.