Sitting most hours of the day is a bane of modern society, and this so-called “sitting disease” has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even breast and colon cancers.

“Our body was designed for physical activity,” said Dr. Pepito de la Peña, current president of the Philippine Society of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, at the recent whole-day health education forum of Diabetease magazine, which aims to educate diabetic patients and their relatives on how to prevent this disease and its dreaded complications.

“In the past, our ancestors had to do manual labor to eat,” he added, lamenting that
modern-day amenities and gadgets have changed our previously healthy lifestyle.

“Sitting disease,” also referred to in medical literature as hypokinetic disease, has literally caused people to be sedentary. If we think about it, we’ll be amazed at how long we sit in a day, as we commute to a regular eight-hour desk job. When we go home in the evening, we’re too exhausted from work and the traffic, so we unwind by sitting or lying on the couch in front of the television with our remote control, until we go to bed and prepare for another day of sitting.

An Australian study showed that each hour spent watching TV is linked to an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 18 percent.

The convenience of online payment of bills, shopping and other transactions also deprives us of the opportunity to do more walking and less sitting.

There’s a move to adopt the “Take a Stand” advocacy started in the United States to promote more walking around the workplace for a few minutes every two hours at least. In the US, this practice has reduced sitting time of office workers by 224 percent (66 minutes per day, including the sitting time at home), with upper back and neck pain decreased by 54 percent, and improved efficiency at work, which compensates for the time they stand up to stretch or walk around a bit.

I understand from Dr. De la Peña that there is a proposed bill in Congress proposing a similar undertaking as Take-a-Stand, to allow workers to stretch and walk around every hour. We should support this bill.

“Sitting disease” may also increase risk of developing cancer. A study several years ago from the American Institute for Cancer Research suggests that nearly 49,000 cases of breast cancer and almost 43,000 cases of colon cancer might be avoided if people were more active and less sedentary. The authors of the study recommend that we should not just do our regular exercise daily, but we should spend less time just sitting for a long stretch.

In another paper, Dr. Neville Owen, from the prestigious Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, estimates that all activities we do while sitting down—watching TV, doing office work, spending hours glued to computers and gadgets, eating—add up to 15.5 hours every single day spent just sitting. He explained that with sitting most part of the day, there are some changes in the body predisposing one to cancer.

Dr. Owen explained that such inactivity disturbs the body’s metabolism, producing a number of biological signals called biomarkers, which have been associated with the development of cancer, specifically breast and colon cancers.

“It’s been surprisingly consistent with what strong relationships there are between physical inactivity and these biomarkers of cancer risk,” Dr. Owen warned.

When we’re more active, we have an enhanced state of well-being, said Dr. De la Peña, who is also a consultant at the East Avenue Medical Center and National Kidney and Transplant Institute.

With a better state of well-being, Dr. De la Peña explained, we can perform daily activities with vigor, reduce risk of various health problems, experience less fatigue and more preparedness in handling “unfavorable unexpected events in our daily life.”

Although regular exercise is not enough to compensate for a whole day of sitting, it helps reorient our mindset to be active the whole day. Dr. De la Peña gave the following guidelines for exercise:

1) The exercise program must be a life plan, and it should be regular, at least four times a week, 30 minutes to one hour per session.

2) It must progress from light, moderate to more vigorous exercises until the proper fitness level is achieved.

3) Perspiration or sweating hard does not promote fitness. Fitness is developed by exercising the muscles of the body, not the sweat glands. In fact, as discussed in our column last week, it’s ideal to exercise with a room temperature of around 16°C.

4) Compute your maximum heart rate (MHR) during exercise as follows: MHR = 220 —one’s age in years. The training heart rate (THR) is 70 to 85 percent of the computed MHR. For middle-age and elderly patients or those with known heart disease, they should consult their doctors first what would be a suitable heart rate goal for them during exercise.

5) If your heart rate does not go down to 120 beats per minute or less after one minute of rest, it’s either one has exercised too much or one’s heart may have some problems that need to be checked.

So, let’s shake a leg and “take a stand” against “sitting disease.”