We’ve written before about the dangers of sitting for too long but in a new study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers have found that sitting can affect us at a biological level, too.

For the study, Aladdin Shadyab, a post-doctoral fellow in family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego and his team of scientists, looked at sitting’s impact on chromosomes.

From the article:

“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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUEl8KrMz14

While Shadyab didn’t initially see a relationship between telomere length and physical activity levels, when he focused on women who didn’t meet the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous daily activity he found some interesting trends:

  • Among women who didn’t get 30 minutes a day of exercise, those who spent about 10 hours or more a day of sedentary time had shorter telomeres than their counterparts. Scientists reported that the lack of activity added up to about eight years of aging meaning that, inactive women who sat more were about eight years older (on average) than women who were inactive but spent less time sitting.
  • And women who got the recommended amount of daily exercise showed zero association between time spent sitting and their telomere length. Researchers believe this suggests that physical activity might counteract how telomeres shorten with age.

The team isn’t sure how much physical activity is needed to negate the aging effects of sitting but the study does show that a sedentary lifestyle has aging effects on our cells. With that information, it’s easy to surmise that exercise can combat the aging process.

Source: Time