So here you are once again just sitting there staring at a screen.
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.
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