How Sitting Too Much Can Lead to Heart Disease

A sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor for heart disease. The more you sit, the less you move, and the less you move, the more your risk increases.

Sitting a lot can kill you even if you exercise regularly. There is a new saying floating around: Sitting is the new smoking. That’s because evidence is coming out showing that sitting for long periods of time can have a profound negative effect on your health.

A study published at the end of 2017 in the Annals of Internal Medicine found evidence that sitting for long periods of time is a risk factor for early death. According to their study, the more time you sit, the greater your risk for early death becomes. Here are some statistics from the study:

* Participants in the study who sat for more than 13 hours per day had a 200 percent greater risk of death than participants who sat for less than 11 hours
* Participants who moved more and sat less (sitting less than 30 minutes at a time) had a 55 percent lower risk than those who sat for 30 minutes or more at a time.

•Participants who often sat longer than 90 minutes at a time were about twice as likely to die than those who always limited their sitting time to less than 90 minutes at a time

Another study compared transit drivers who sit most of the time with conductors and guards who are standing or moving most of the time. The study compared people with similar diets, and they found that the people who sat a lot had twice the risk of developing heart disease as the people who moved around a lot.

The largest study about the dangers of sitting involved 800,000 people. This study, published in 2011 and run by Loughborough University and the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, showed that people who sit the most, when compared to those who sat the least, had an increase in disease and death, specifically

•Their diabetes risk increased by 112 percent
•They had a 147 percent increase in cardiovascular events, like heart attacks and strokes.
•They had a 90 percent increase in death from cardiovascular events.
•They had a 49 percent increase in death from any cause.

Source: Corewell Health