James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, is interested in how much people move — and how much they don’t. It should be no surprise that he discovered we don’t move as much as we think we do (people are notoriously inaccurate when estimating all kinds of personal information like that). And it turns out that our sedentary ways are causing us more harm that we might have suspected. According to Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center:
“This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — ‘the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,’ Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for ‘vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,’ as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.”
Surprisingly, regular exercise, say an hour or so a day, isn’t the solution; it doesn’t make up for the damage that sitting does. However, many, many minor movements throughout the day can make a significant difference. Anything that gets you moving, even something as simple as bending over and tying your shoes, counts. Read the details in the NY Times here. It will make you want to get up out of your chair — or at least wiggle around in it!
