Dr. Mitch: Sitting at your desk all day may put you at greater risk for this

hello dr rich good morning to you sir okay so what's the uh... bad news here that even if i work out regularly uh... if i'm sitting all day uh... i'm going to uh... die soon that basically all but but it's building things that we've been talking about this is and uh... adding us giving us more information so we can make better choices for our lives from the american journal the journal the american college of cardiology and again from that massive database out of the uk

90,000 people, they put an accelerometer on their wrists, they measure their physical activity during a day, how much time they slept, how much they were seated, how much time they put into moderate or vigorous physical activity, then they followed them. And lo and behold, as you guys already know, the more time they spend sedentary, the worse the risk for them in terms of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, and strokes. And in fact, the inflection point seemed to be somewhere around 10.5 hours a day of being sedentary.

The key method here is, as we've already learned in our previous conversations, standing doesn't help, so standing desk doesn't make a big difference, but moving is important. And so I think this reinforces the importance of about every 30 minutes getting up. And look, you may not be able to walk over to your neighbor's little cubicle. You may not be able to go to the water cooler because it doesn't exist or the coffee room or anything like that.

Maybe you want to look into what we used to call desk exercises, squats, chest, wall push-ups, things like that that you can do easily at your office, get your heart rate up without looking like a silly person. I was going to use any more colorful language, but we'll just say silly person. And without sweating so much that you can't continue to do your day. But the key message here is one,

move around don't stay seated and that's tough think about it how much time do you lose every day in your commute either a seated on the bus or the metro or seated in your car so that that already put you disadvantage so anything you can do it work to kind of move around about every thirty minutes is worth doing the other interesting thing is they look at basically three different groups of people couch potatoes were sedentary obviously did the worst next bad and uh... but better

was the group of people who weren't couch potato or weren't couch potatoes they were sedentary work yes but they were also also physically active in other words they got up the exercise they did something like that so they didn't do is well as people who weren't sedentary but exercising well didn't erase all of the badness from being sedentary certainly was a positive certainly made things better

And then the best group were the group that weren't sedentary and were active at the same time. And we're moving and exercising. So, message is simple. Try not to be seated for long periods of time at a stretch. Exercise, sure, but don't count on exercise by itself to undo all the bad effects of if you're sitting for too long. And the best is to be active, not to be seated for long periods of time and to exercise on a regular basis.

Now this is all just reinforcing stuff that you've all heard, but it just adds additional evidence and gives it a specific number. In fact, one of the things they found is for every five or 10 or 15 minutes of being sedentary that you substituted with some degree of moderate exercise, dramatic change in terms of your cardiovascular risk, your risk of heart attack or stroke. So you're not hopeless, you're not helpless. There's stuff that you can do. Small changes do make a good difference.

And so there is hope here not to give up. Do something. Don't be sedentary. All right. Thank you. A pleasure. You have a great day. You have a great day. That's a doctor's orders. That's a Dr. Mitch Schulman.