Check out this article from Yahoo about the effects of sitting on the couch and watching TV. The article states by doing this regularly; you will take years off your life! Sad to say but I think most people would rather sit and watch TV whenever they want rather than live an extra 2 or 3 years.
Getting regular exercise is obviously an important part of staying healthy. But what about what we do with the rest of our time? A new study suggests that the time we all spend sitting is taking years offlife expectancy in the U.S.
Scientists are just beginning to investigate how sitting affects health, and early evidence has linked an excess of sitting time to all kinds of chronic maladies, particularly heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Now, a new analysis published in the British Medical Journal suggests that the life expectancy of the entire U.S. population could increase if Americans simply reduce the time they reduce channel-surfing on the sofa.
Researchers looked at the results of five studies that explored the effects on nearly 167,000 people of sitting and watching television. Then they turned to national data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how much time Americans report sitting and watching TV.
Based on all this data, the researchers calculated that limiting the time Americans spend sitting to three hours or fewer each day would increase the life expectancy of the U.S. population by 2 years. Cutting down TV watching to fewer than two hours each day would bump life expectancy up by another 1.4 years.
Exercise is a good thing, and getting the amount recommended by groups like the CDC, the American Heart Association and the National Cancer Institute — 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise five times each week — is a vital part of staying healthy. But Peter Katzmarzyk, the study’s lead author and a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., said it’s becoming clearer that people need to do more.
via Yahoo