Health: The Longer You Sit, the Earlier You Die

Some of us may not like to hear this ...

Unlike most bad news, this one is best heard standing up: people who sit more than 6 hours a day are more likely to die earlier.

That's even for people who exercise regularly after long sit-a-thons at the office and aren't obese.

Even after adjusting for body mass index (BMI) and smoking, the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die.

People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying. Those who sat a lot and moved less than three and a half hours per day are the most likely to die early: researchers found a 94 percent increased risk for women and 48 percent increase for men, they announced recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

From The Longer You Sit, the Earlier You Die by Marissa Cevallos, August 25, 2010, at Chicago Tribune.