Just 15 minutes of exercise can counteract the physical harms of working at a desk all day, a new study suggests.
This comprehensive study provides new evidence of the negative health effects of a sedentary lifestyle, and in particular a regular office job, which is associated with a higher risk of death, for example from cardiovascular disease.
On the other hand, the study also found that small tweaks in daily routines can lead to effective and long-lasting positive changes.
Taiwanese researchers studied 481,688 participants with an average age of 39 for 13 years, during which time 26,257 people in the sample reportedly died.
The study, published in the scientific journal JAMA Network Open, compared those who “mostly sat”, “mostly did not sit” and a mixture of the two while doing their work in order to measure the effect of “sitting for long periods at work”.
As part of the experiment, the researchers also tracked the amount of “leisure time physical activity” the group did to control for supplemental activity.
Worryingly, it has been found that working in a sedentary job for long periods can lead to long-term health problems, including a 16 percent higher risk of death overall.
When researchers compared those who mostly sat with those who mostly worked in “non-residential jobs”, the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was 34 percent higher.
The in-depth study also investigated how individuals’ leisure time activities affect mortality rates. It found that if a relatively sedentary person in a sedentary job increased their level of exercise by 15 to 30 minutes a day, “mortality could be reduced to a level close to that of sedentary individuals who are mostly not sitting at work”.
The study concluded that:
Sitting for long periods of time at work is considered normal as part of the modern lifestyle and does not receive the attention it deserves, even though its detrimental impact on health outcomes is well documented.
In this study, alternating between sitting and not sitting at work, as well as doing an extra 15 to 30 minutes of physical activity a day during free time, reduced the harms of sitting for long periods of time at work.
“In 2020, the World Health Organization’s guidelines on physical activity recommended for the first time that sedentary behaviors should be reduced due to their impact on health… Several studies have found that those who sit for long periods of time have increased mortality rates from all causes, as well as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.”