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Sitting Too Much Ages You By 8 Years (time.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-things-work dept.

Sitting too much during the day has been linked to a host of diseases, from obesity to heart problems and diabetes, as well as early death. It's not hard to understand why: being inactive can contribute to weight gain, which in turn is a risk factor for heart attack, stroke, hypertension and unhealthy blood sugar levels. On top of everything else, sitting has detrimental effects on cells at the biological level, according to a new report published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. From a report on Time: In the new study, scientists led by Aladdin Shadyab, a post-doctoral fellow in family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego, traced sitting's impact on the chromosomes. They took blood samples from nearly 1,500 older women enrolled in the Women's Health Initiative, a long-term study of chronic diseases in post-menopausal women, and focused on the telomeres: the tips of the tightly packed DNA in every cell. Previous studies have found that as cells divide and age, they lose bits of the telomeres, so the length of this region can be a marker for how old a cell (and indirectly the person the cells belong to) is. The researchers compared telomere length to how much the women exercised, to see if physical activity affected aging.

6 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. They might have reversed cause and effect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article they found that women who had shorter telomeres, or were biologically older, moved less. Not in the past but during the week they were studied.

    For some reason they think this means that moving less shortens the telomeres when the other way is obviously likely.
    Being older causes people to exercise less, just wouldn't make a good headline.

  2. Remote work is validated once again. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My commute time equated to over 2 hours a day. At one point in my career, I was able to offer up a great trade-off to work remotely. In exchange for getting an additional hour of work from me every day, I spent the other hour exercising. A win-win for both parties involved.

    Sadly, I now deal with a boss who is so old-fashioned that the concept of working remotely isn't even an option, even when enticed with the benefit of getting an additional 20 - 40 hours more work out of me every month. Very frustrating, considering my job can easily be done remotely.

    Cities dealing with more and more pollution. Commute times grow due to overpopulation. Stress and physical impacts of sitting in a car. I grow tired of the bullshit arguments against remote work. Managers and business owners need to wake the fuck up.

    1. Re:Remote work is validated once again. by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You're fighting the cultural expectations of management and power, and likely at the root, primate dominance.

      Your boss assumes that being boss requires some level of physical control of you, and that means controlling your locality to reinforce his perception of dominance and control over you.

      It goes a long way towards explaining why incompetent employees who show up and don't evidence much insubordination are tolerated so well.

    2. Re:Remote work is validated once again. by swb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not really meant as a joke. For a lot of managers, at its core, managing is about being in charge, and being in charge is about dominance.

      And it ultimately looks like innate primate behavior. They're achieved status in the troop and they need to dominate the other members or they fear they will lose their dominance.

  3. So, sitting is purely by proxy? by TimothyHollins · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It doesn't appear to be sitting that's being tested here, but rather inactivity. These two things are not the same (one can be inactive without sitting) though they frequently occur together.

  4. Social gender values by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why did they just study women?
    It seems like anything that affects women gets attention, while society doesn't even value men.
    Another prime example is the massive amount of attention and funding that breast cancer gets compared to prostate cancer, even though 1 in 7 men get prostate cancer while 1 in 8 women get breast cancer.