A new study has shown that office workers who spend most of their day sitting at the desk are at risk of developing heart disease or type 2 diabetes. What’s worse, prolonged sitting hurts your heath even if you regularly go to the gym.
The upside of the study is that we can easily prevent these experiences by simply getting out of our chairs, and either standing at the desk or pacing around the office for a while.
Genevieve Healy, field expert from the University of Queensland (Herston) and the study’s lead author, gave a statement informing that taking some of our sitting time and converting it into standing time will benefit both out hearts and our metabolisms.
She went on to stress that replacing some of our sitting time with standing time will improve our “blood sugar, fats in the blood and cholesterol levels”, and if we decide to go a step even further and replace some of our sitting time with walking time, the change will “have additional benefits for your waistline and body mass index”.
Healy and her colleagues picked our about 800 subjects, both women and men, with an age range of 36 to 80 years old. The researchers were interested in documenting how much time each subject spent running, walking, standing, and sitting in a chair or lying down. The subject had to wear monitors 24 hours a day for a period of 7 days.
On top of this, the experts also took blood samples and measured the subjects’ blood pressure levels, cholesterol, body mass index and waist circumference.
The results showed that subjects who spent two (2) hours per day standing instead of sitting had blood sugar levels that went down by about 2 percent (2%), and triglyceride levels that went down 11 percent (11%).
Subjects who chose to spend more than just two (2) hours standing increased their good cholesterol (HDL) and decreased their bad cholesterol (LDL).
Subjects who decided to spend two (2) hours a day walking instead of sitting had blood sugar levels that went down by about 11 percent (11%) and triglyceride levels that went down 14 percent (14%). It’s worth mentioning that their good cholesterol levels also got higher.
The biggest change could be observed in subjects who replaced two (2) hours of sitting time with running time. Their waists became smaller by almost three (3) inches, and their body mass index (BDI) went down by about 11 percent (11%).
The study was published in the European Heart Journal.
Image Source: forbes.com
