Exercise is No Magic Bullet Against Our Sedentary LifestyleJanuary 22, 2015 - Author: steph - No Comments
A new paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine says that excessive sitting is connected to an increased risk for cancer, heart disease and diabetes. This may not come as a huge surprise as most people already heard that our increasingly sedentary lives were bad for us. The shocker in this latest news is that regular exercise is no magic bullet against the negative effects of spending so much of the rest of our day sitting. The study authors report that just because we exercise for a half hour or an hour a day we can’t then spend all the rest of our waking time sitting and see any significantly reduced risk for certain diseases. Some exercise is, of course, better than none, but the main recommendation given in this study is to gradually increase the time each day that we spend upright and moving around.
Given some of the recent studies by Slyce about image recognition, these findings should come as no surprise. For tens and hundreds of thousands of years we walked and ran around gathering food and chasing animals as hunter-gatherers. Our modern lives where we spend more than half of our waking hours each day sitting are a sharp departure from this. It is also a sudden departure that our bodies have had no time to adjust to in an evolutionary sense. It is a good thing that the trend in computing technology is for it to get smaller and more mobile as time passes as more mobile is what we ourselves need to be if we want to stay healthy.