Humans were designed to move. But modern lifestyles and office jobs rarely prompt us to roam around. Quite the opposite, says Peter Katzmarzyk, an opiderniologist at the University of Louisiana.
sitting is ubiquitous in our lives today. You know, we sit while we're eating, we sit in the car, we sit while we watch TV And many of us sit for many hours at work. So an average, Americans report they sit between four and a half to five hours a day Katzmarzyk said.
And, as he says, those chair-centered days matter to our health, just like ex "We can't throw away physical activity. It's extremely important. We have 60 years of research showing us that. But sedentary behavior is also important ...lf you exercise for 30 minutes a day. What goes on in the other 23 and a half hours a day is also very important," Katzmarzyk said.
Katzmarzyk and his colleagues are part of a new generation of researchers trying to discover how sitting day affects our lifespans.
This is a relatively new area of study. Studies that have assessed the relationship between sitting and mortality or television viewing and mortality are very rare. There's only been a few of them, actually five or six now, in the last four or five years," said Katzmarzyk.