Combining and collating the nine studies’ data, the scientists found that most of the volunteers sat a lot, averaging close to 10 hours a day, and many barely moved, exercising moderately, usually by walking, for as little as two or three minutes a day. These studies’ volunteers were middle-aged or older and lived in Europe or the United States. The scientists wound up gathering results from nine recent studies in which almost 50,000 men and women wore accelerometers. So, for the new study, which was published last week in a special issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine devoted to the World Health Organization’s updated physical activity guidelines and related research, many of the authors of the 2016 review decided to, in effect, repeat that earlier research and analysis, but, this time, use data from people who had worn activity monitors to objectively track how much they moved and sat. But if large numbers of people misremember this way, the paradoxical result is that exercise looks less potent than it is, since the studies’ “active” people appear to have needed plenty of exercise to gain health benefits, when the objective amount of exercise they actually completed was less, and this smaller amount produced the gains. We tend to be unreliable narrators of our lives, overestimating physical activity and underestimating how much we sit. That study, though, like most similar, earlier research, asked people to remember how much they had moved or sat, which can be problematic. A 2016 study involving more than a million people found, instead, that men and women needed to exercise moderately for about 60 to 75 minutes a day in order to diminish the undesirable effects of sitting.
Some past research had suggested the answer is no. In general, in these studies, couchbound people are far more likely to die prematurely than active people are.
Multiple past epidemiological studies show links between sitting and mortality. Not surprisingly, there could be long-term health consequences from this physical quietude. Recent surveys of people’s behavior since the start of the pandemic indicate that a majority of us are exercising less and sitting more than we were a year ago. The study, which relied on objective data from tens of thousands of people about how they spent their days, found that those who were the most sedentary faced a high risk of dying young, but if people got up and moved, they slashed that threat substantially, even if they did not move much.įor most of us, sitting for prolonged periods of time is common, especially now, as we face the dual challenges of Covid-related restrictions and the shortening, chilly days of winter. Walking for at least 11 minutes a day could lessen the undesirable health consequences of sitting for hours and hours, according to a helpful new study of the ways in which both inactivity and exercise influence how long we live.
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