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Study Suggests Sitting
Less Can Extend Life
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• By Rebecca Widiss
VOAnews.com
hat's the best seat in the house? It may be whichever one you use the least.
New research suggests that cutting daily sitting time to less than three hours
might extend your life by two years.
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Humans were designed to move. But modern lifestyles and office jobs rarely prom
us to roam around. Quite the opposite, says Peter Katzmarzyk, an epidemiologist at the
University of Louisiana.
"Sitting is ubiquitous in our lives today. You know, we sit while we're eating, we sit
in the car, we sit while we watch TV. And many of us sit for many hours at work. So on
average, Americans report they sit between four and a half to five hours a day," Katzma
said.
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And, as he says, those chair-centered days matter to our health, just like exercise
"We can't throw away physical activity. It's extremely important. We have 60 years
of research showing us that. But sedentary behavior is also important. . . . If you exercis
for 30 minutes a day. What goes on in the other 23 and a half hours a day is also very
important," Katzmarzyk said.
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Katzmarzyk and his colleagues are part of a new generation of researchers trying
discover how sitting all day affects our lifespans.
"This is a relatively new area of study. . . . Studies that have assessed the relations
between sitting and mortality or television viewing and mortality are very rare. There's of
been a few of them, actually five or six now, in the last four or five years," said Katzman
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