Thursday, September 8, 2011

"That Stuff Will Kill You"

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html?_r=1

Another cut:
The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.

The heart of the matter:
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

All of these observations of correlation beg the same question:  Why? 

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know my thoughts; what you eat impacts how much you move, and more specifically, how your body responds to what you eat impacts how much you move.  The mechanisms are complex and change over time for the same people, due to acruing damage from stress chronic stress, chronic inflammation from omega fat imbalances, lack of vitamins D, K and perhaps certain B vitamins, etc. 

Should you sit less?  Yes, if possible.  Is sitting really a new item on the list of "stuff that will kill you"?  That remains to be seen, because it is just as likely to be a symptom of what is killing you - metabolic derrangment - as it is to be a cause per se.

I hope they will be able to sort through the causality vice correlation issue, but they don't seem to be close right now.

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