To get straight to the point, according to the Health Council, people who sit for more than 8 hours a day and who also exercise little in between have a 74% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than people who sit for less than 4 hours. and lots of exercise in between.
That is of course a big difference and if you have a sedentary job it is an impossible task to reduce sitting that much. However, the sentence has two parts, one is sitting for less time and two is moving more in between.
There are opportunities for everyone there. Knowledge Center for Sport and Exercise drew up an insightful fact sheet about it, and Leefstijlclub provides practical advice about it.
WHAT?
These days, almost everyone is guilty of sitting too much. By sitting we mean sedentary, (semi) lying activities that require little energy. Sleeping is an exception. Examples include watching TV or reading on the couch, working behind a screen, gaming or sitting during transport.
In science, this is also called ‘sedentary behavior’. The figures regarding sitting behavior are read once every two years via the lifestyle monitor of CBS and RIVM. The most recent figures are from 2021, when Dutch people aged 4 years and older spent an average of 9.1 hours sitting every day.
Why?
When you sit, your legs do nothing. And yet our legs are the largest muscles in our body. Exercise ensures that our body burns energy from food and exercising for longer than 5 minutes activates fat metabolism. If you sit for a long time, the opposite happens and our body processes fat and sugar from the blood less well. It is precisely this fat and sugar that increases the risk of conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and complaints of muscles, bones and joints.
According to the Health Council, people who sit more than 8 hours a day and exercise very little have a 74% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than people who sit less than 4 hours a day and exercise a lot. In addition, sitting a lot (more than 8 hours a day) can lead to a 10 to 27% increased risk of premature death. More exercise can weaken the negative health effects of sitting, we call this a dose-response relationship.
How?
It has not yet been sufficiently researched how much more you need to exercise to counteract the negative effects of sitting, but it seems that you need to move a lot more than the exercise guidelines indicate to completely compensate for the negative effects of sitting a lot.
We know that after 1.5 to 3 hours of sitting, blood sugar rises so much that the pancreas has to switch on insulin, which is the trigger for the liver to convert sugars into fat. Of course, no one wants that and it promotes overweight and obesity.
Download the complete Factsheet on sitting behavior here: https://www.kennisbanksportenbewegen.nl/?file=10896&m=1659616989&action=file.download