The good news is that sitting less and exercising more could reduce that risk; in fact, halving the average time of four hours that most of us sit in a day reduces the mortality risk three-fold, to 2.3 per cent.
But anything we can do to reduce our time sitting would help, say researchers from San Jorge University in Zaragoza, Spain, who assessed the health risks from 54 countries.
On average, 60 per cent of people spend more than three hours a day sitting, and the average sitting time is 4.7 hours a day. The mortality rate from sitting isn’t quite as uniform, however; its biggest impact was in Lebanon, where 11.6 per cent of deaths were attributed to too much sitting, while the lowest effects were in Mexico, where just 0.6 per cent of deaths were the result of the ‘chair effect’, as the researchers called it.
(Source: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2016; 51: 253)
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