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

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.

Comments

So basically

[hcs_$reboot]

doing some exercise daily increases your life expectancy by 8 years.

Re:So basically

[BarbaraHudson]

Too bad the study is bullshit because it's based on the WHI (Women's Health Initiative), a study that had huge design and implementation flaws and bad data analysis.

The WHI claimed to study the effects of hormone replacement therapy on women. However, rather than using bio-identical human hormones, they used Premarin and Prempro (the PREgnant MARe unINe). Hint - human estrogen is not bio-identical to horse estrogen, so we're already off to a bad start. Also, at the time Premarin was approved, the 50+ impurities were allowed by the FDA because the manufacturer didn't claim a therapeutic benefit from them. It would not be approved on that basis today, but rather, its been grandfathered in, same as many other drugs that were approved under less stringent testing requirements. Choosing one drug supplier for all 150,000+ women was a mistake. All it told us was the effects of horse hormones on women. We now know that Premarin is not good for your liver.

Second, the study cohort was mostly too old and too fat to be a representative sample of women in the age cohort, so there was severe selection bias, which the British found negatively influenced the results after repeating the experiments, leading to the opposite conclusion - for women who have been post-menopausal 5 years or less, estrogen (not Premarin) benefits outweighed the risks. The biggest risk factors are controllable - don't smoke, don't be a fattie, and don't take progestins and you can enjoy the benefits of longer life, lower cardiovascular problems, and less loss of bone density with minimal risk.

Menopause is not normal. In the entire chain of mammals, there are only two species (out of more than 80) whales, and humans, who go through menopause. In humans, it's easily explained by our ability to live longer outpacing our ability to evolve to accommodate the lengthened lifespan. Doesn't make it normal, it makes it a disorder that we can and should take whatever preventative measures we can to prevent it's impacting our lives.

The British government has been running a campaign directed at doctors, urging them to discuss HRT with their female patients, hopefully instead of prescribing antidepressants to deal with menopause, as happened after the whole "HRT IS BAD" scare.

Of course, like any big scare, it got headlines. The corrections rarely make the front page, or the news, anywhere. Same as most breakthrough medical studies that are later found to be either not repeatable (+60%) or show only minimal results.

You can't draw conclusions about normal human aging based on a non-representative cohort of women fed horse hormones laced with impurities. They need to at the very least change their data source and re-run their analysis.

Re:So basically

[OrangeTide]

Having 8 more years of life to spend exercising doesn't seem so great.

Work and cars

[OffTheLip]

For many sitting starts in a car during a long commute to/from work followed by sitting for another 8+ hours. When I was faced with that I would spend a portion of my lunch break walking around my work site.

Re:Work and cars

[asylumx]

Age is not just about how you look. That is vanity, not age. People who look great still get heart disease, among other afflictions.

Re:Work and cars

[ShanghaiBill]

I spend almost as much money on my bicycle a month as I would spend in gas a month.

I bought my bike for $100 on Craigslist 5 years ago, ride it every day, and my only expenses during that time have been a set of kevlar tires and a bell. If you are regularly spending $600 for a new set of wheel hubs, then you are doing it wrong.

They might have reversed cause and effect

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What is the 'biological' level?

[fortfive]

As opposed to the 'mineral' level, maybe?

Remote work is validated once again.

[geekmux]

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.

Re:Remote work is validated once again.

[swb]

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.

Re:Remote work is validated once again.

[swb]

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.

So, sitting is purely by proxy?

[TimothyHollins]

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.

Social gender values

[JustNiz]

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.