Sitting for too long every day could age you by eight years

We all know that sitting too much isn’t good for us.

Apart from anything else, no one feels great after being slouched over a desk for nine hours. Your eyes ache. Your back aches. Your arse is numb.

On a more serious note, sitting supposedly raises your risk of deadly diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

Although lying prostate in front of Netflix for the entire weekend is a precious joy, remaining sedentary for hours on end on a daily basis is a killer.

And now it’s been found to be potentially responsible for making us look haggard.

According to a new report published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, sitting for too long can have a detrimental effect on cells.

The study, conducted by the University of California San Diego, looked at the blood samples from almost 1,500 older women, with the intention of tracing what impact sitting has on chromosomes.

They focused on telomeres – the DNA tips in each cell, to see if their length was effected by being sedentary. The longer the telomere, the younger the cell.

Researchers compared telomere length to how much the women exercised to see if physical activity had any effect on aging.

Each woman wore an accelerometer to track how active she’d been during the week.

When the researchers focused on women who weren’t meeting the recommended daily 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and who were sedentary for 10 hours and more, they found that they had much shorter telomeres than those who spent less time sitting.

Source: http://metro.co.uk/2017/01/19/sitting-for-too-long-every-day-could-age-you-by-eight-years-6390612/