Too much sleep and sitting can kill your early
According to a research, sleeping more than 9 hours and too much of sitting can lead to early death.
According to the Sax Institute’s “45 and Up Study”, anyone who sleeps too much, keeping sitting most of the time and is not physically active enough is more than four times likely to die early compared to individuals who sleep 7 to 8 hours daily and are on the move by being physically active. Sax Institute is a non-profit organization.
What does too much sitting means – it means sitting more than seven hours a day. Not being physically active is defined as exercising (walking, gymming, etc.) less than 150 minutes a week.
The lead author Dr Melody Ding from University of Sydney said, ‘This is the first study to look at how those things (sleep and sitting) might act together.’
When you add a lack of exercise into the mix, you get a type of “triple whammy” effect.
‘Our study shows that we should really be taking these behaviours together as seriously as we do other risk factors such as levels of drinking and unhealthy eating patterns,’ Dr Ding added.
The health behaviours of more than 230,000 of the participants in the “45 and Up Study” were analysed to conclude this finding.
Lifestyle behaviours like smoking, high alcohol intake, poor diet and being physically inactive and added excess sitting time and too little/too much sleep into the equation were accounted for.
The team found another problematic triple threat: smoking, high alcohol intake and lack of sleep (less than seven hours a night) is also linked to a more than four-times greater risk of early death.
‘The take-home message is that if we want to design public health programmes that will reduce the massive burden and cost of lifestyle-related disease we should focus on how these risk factors work together rather than in isolation,’ explained study co-author professor Adrian Bauman.
The non-communicable diseases (such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer) now kill more than 38 million people around the world and cause more deaths than infectious disease.
Preventing early death could be so easy – be on the move and sleep 7 to 8 hours daily instead of just sitting, and sleeping too much, in addition to stopping to smoke and take alcohol in moderation.
