A new American study has just shown that people who exercise, even a few minutes a day, lower their risk of death.
Sedentary lifestyle (lack of physical activity) is considered the fourth risk factor for death in the world (6%). The World Health Organization (WHO) even estimates that it is the main cause of 21 to 25% of breast or colon cancer, 27% of cases of diabetes and about 30% of cases of ischemic heart disease.
Faced with these worrying figures, American researchers are reassuring this Sunday. In the review Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (MSSE), they report that replacing a few minutes a day of sedentary lifestyle with even little activity helps reduce the risk of mortality.
To reach this conclusion, these scientists from several American universities followed 3,029 participants, aged 50 to 79, as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
Conducted by the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this study aimed to assess the health of children and adults across the United States..
Just a few minutes a day
The volunteers had to wear very sensitive accelerometers, more efficient than those used in previous studies, to monitor their activity for seven days in a row. The data was collected by the CDC, which then tracked participant death rates over the next eight years.
And the results are final. They show that replacing only a few minutes of sedentary lifestyle with activity helped reduce the risk of mortality. The same results were recorded by people already used to regular exercise.
Household for example
In numbers, the least active participants were five times more likely to die sooner than the most active, and three times more likely to die prematurely than those who fell into the more active category.
In addition, the activity does not need to be sustained to produce beneficial effects. “People who walked in their homes, washed dishes or swept the brooms recorded a longer life expectancy than those who remained seated at their desks,” explains Ezra Fishman, main author of the work, in comments relayed by Relaxnews.
He says adding just 10 minutes a day of low activity could be enough to make a difference in death rates. And by increasing the activity to 30 minutes a day, the results were even more convincing. “The activity doesn’t have to be particularly vigorous to be beneficial. This is the public health message, ”he concludes.
French authorities convinced
A public health message taken up this week by the French health authorities. In a report and opinion published on Friday, ANSES (1) recommends the reduction of sedentary behavior and the practice of physical activities, “in all life contexts and at all ages”. “The development of spaces reserved for pedestrians and cyclists, the promotion of collective modes of transport, the organization of working time and school time would notably make it possible to achieve this objective”, she thinks.
(1) The National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety
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