Study says get up every 30 minutes for a longer life

You can spend a lot of accumulated time on your bottom in the course of a day. Or you can sit for lengthy spells without a break.

Both, it turns out, are very bad for you.

Whether you’re a heavy sitter or a binge-sitter, racking up prolonged sedentary time increases your risk of early death, according to a study published in Tuesday’s edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That conclusion held up even after researchers took account of mitigating factors, such as time spent exercising. Even for people who hit the gym after a long day in a desk chair, sitting can be deadly.

The findings led the study’s authors to suggest that people who sit a lot should get up and move around every 30 minutes to counter the health risks that come with prolonged sedentary behavior.

The study team, led by Columbia University exercise researcher Keith Diaz, tracked the movements of close to 8,000 Americans older than 45 by asking them to wear an accelerometer on their hip.

Over a period of 10 days, sitting or lounging behavior took up the equivalent of 12.3 hours over a 16-hour waking day — about 77 percent, on average.

That’s a whole lot of sitting. But subjects differed in the extent to which they hunkered down for long stretches without getting up and moving around. When researchers measured the “bout length” of subjects’ sitting spells, they found that 52 percent lasted less than a half-hour, 22 percent lasted between a halfhour and just under an hour, 14 percent lasted 60 to 89 minutes and 14 percent went on for more than 90 minutes.

After tracking subjects for four years, the researchers found that subjects who racked up the most time sitting were most likely to have died during the study period, and those who spent the least time sitting were least likely to have died. That was no surprise.

But when they looked at the death rates as a function of how often subjects went long hours without getting up, they saw a similar pattern: Those whose sitting bouts tended to be lengthier were more likely to have died than were those whose sitting spells tended to be shorter.

Make no mistake, the authors of the new research cautioned: “Accumulation of large volumes of sedentary time is a hazardous health behavior regardless of how it is accumulated.” But logging sedentary time in shorter bouts of sitting “is the least harmful pattern of accumulation.”

Study participants who racked up the most time in a chair tended to be older, were more likely to smoke, and were disproportionately African-American. They tended to be teetotalers, to have a higher body-mass index, and were less likely to get much intentional exercise. They were also more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, worrisome cholesterol readings and a history of stroke, atrial fibrillation or coronary heart disease.