Sitting Takes Years Off Your Life
Sit for three hours per day? Deduct two years
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Sitting for more than three hours a day—even if you exercise—can shorten your life expectancy by two years, a new study finds. In a paper published Monday in the online journal BMJ Open, researchers found that physical activity and sedentary behavior independently affect health and life expectancy. In other words, exercise does not cancel out sedentary behavior. “Whether you’re physically active and meet the exercise guidelines, or if you’re not active, sitting is bad,” said Peter Katzmarzyk, the lead author of the paper. According to the study, inactivity has nearly the same effect on mortality as does smoking. Watching two hours of television daily cut life expectancy by an additional 1.4 years. The study noted that the average American is inactive for nearly 55 percent of the day.
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