According to a new study, not exerting yourself can do more harm than good.
A study that was conducted by Alpa Patel and several of her colleagues at the American Cancer
Society in Atlanta has shown that sitting around too much can have a negative effect on your life. This is true even for people who exercise regularly.
The study published in the Journal of Epidemiology finds that the more a person sits in their spare time the greater their risk is of living a shorter life.
Sitting is something that we all love to do, especially during our leisure time but in future you might want to find some form of physical activity to do instead.
Researchers came to this interesting study finding after analyzing data from surveys of more than 120,000 participants of the Cancer Prevention study.
They found that those who reported sitting for more than six hours a day were more likely to die within a 14 year follow up period than those who reported staying active in their free time.
Oddly enough the study results were the same no matter how active a person was during the day, meaning that a person could be very active at their job for example, but still be at risk of early death because when they got home after work they sat around.
When it came to cause of death, heart disease was the most common disease, even more than cancer, another shocking finding.
Women were also at greater risk than men of earlier death, a fact that researchers are unable to explain.
They do suggest a cause for why people who sit for long periods of time tend to die earlier, that being that they engage in unhealthy eating habits when they do.
