“It was perhaps a little “naive” to think that with only small gestures like changing from sitting to standing, without really increasing physical activity, that we would reduce or prevent cardiovascular events just with that. », Commented cardiologist Josep Iglesies-Grau, of the Montreal Heart Institute.
After studying some 83,000 members of a British biobank, the study authors report having “observed a linear association between an increased risk of orthostatic circulatory disease and increased time spent standing, with no protective association for the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
After around ten hours a day, they continue, we observe “a deleterious association between the increase in time spent in a sitting position and the increased risk of orthostatic circulatory disease and cardiovascular disease”.
They say this “challenges current intervention strategies that focus solely on replacing time spent sitting with time spent standing without increasing physical activity.”
This is indeed the obvious conclusion, confirmed Doctor Iglesies-Grau: it is not possible to improve your cardiovascular health without moving, even if only for a few minutes at a time, since “a A person can be very active and very sedentary at the same time.
“It’s clear that (working standing instead of sitting) is not a real solution,” he said. The real solution is to change something else. »
Sedentary lifestyle and physical inactivity are two different things, recalled Dr. Iglesies-Grau. An individual who spends ten hours a day sitting is sedentary even if he does an hour of physical activity every evening, he illustrated.
The best strategy to combat a sedentary lifestyle therefore consists of interspersing the working day with small “active” breaks: getting up to stretch, walking while chatting with a colleague, using the stairs rather than the elevator, commuting by bike, going down an earlier bus or metro stop to walk a little… the cumulative effect of all those minutes of activity should not be overlooked, said Dr. Iglesies-Grau.
“The best thing is to minimize the time you spend sitting,” he said. This is a reflection that we must all make personally: how can I change my routine? »
The findings of this study were published by theInternational Journal of Epidemiology.
