Need another reason to get up off the couch and get moving? New research shows that sitting less can slow the aging process and contribute to longer life.
The findings, from two new studies, provide new evidence of the health benefits of being active and the dangers of living a sedentary life,
The New York Times reports.
They echo past studies that have found that the more hours that people spend sitting, the more likely they are to develop diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions, and potentially to die prematurely — even if they exercise regularly.
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The most striking of the latest two studies, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by scientists in Sweden, tied the amount of time that people spent sitting to changes in so-called “telomeres” — the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands that shorten and fray as a cell ages.
Obesity, illness and other conditions can accelerate the shortening, causing cells to age prematurely, while some evidence suggests that healthy lifestyles may preserve telomere length, delaying cell aging.
The findings indicate that the telomeres in the volunteers who were sitting the least had lengthened over the course of the study. Their cells seemed to be growing physiologically younger.
The second new study, led by the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., compared records of men and women who reported standing on most days over the course of a decade or more with death records, to see whether people who stood more died younger.
The results, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise, found mortality rates declined at higher levels of standing.