Summary Sitting is the New Smoking (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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n/a So Sitting is the new smoking. People have probably heard that. And sedentary behavior is second only to smoking as the leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States. I think that's a pretty stunning statistic because I don't think people think about sitting or being sedentary as a cancer risk. And this graph is from the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans and What it shows is that in the red here, the risk of dying all cause mortality if you sit and you don't do any activity.
n/a So this line on this bottom is doing activity. So this man, you can see he's walking. So This is doing none and then this is increasing your activity. And this is the daily sitting time going from none to sitting a lot. And if you're in the red, you're kind of in trouble.
n/a And if you're in the green, you're getting out of trouble because this is a lower mortality rate. So in the red all going towards the green Smoking towards the green is better. So if you sit a lot, but then you exercise a lot, you have to exercise quite a bit, then you can actually move over here into the green. If you don't sit very much and you exercise a lot, you're in the green a bit of the time. So this is just a a kind of a visual way of looking at the more activity that you can do, the lower your risk of dying.
n/a Now let's talk about sedentary behavior, why I'm bringing this up. It's because sedentary behavior has an increased risk, not just of all cause mortality but of specific cancers can be increased. The risk of can be increased by sedentary behavior. So breast cancer, colon cancer and endometrial cancer have very strong evidence that sedentary behavior increases the risk. This is also this is also a graph that I really like to show people because it also is looking at The relationship of exercise to all cause mortality and is looking at it in a different kind of way.
n/a This bottom area on the graph is looking at leisure time physical activity. Smoking activities such as walking or riding a bike or or it doesn't have to be strenuous activity, just leisure time activity and looking at the risk of mortality. What it shows is that there's a very early Steep slope going where your risk is going down. This is like people that go from doing nothing to a little bit of exercise, not even a lot of exercise, but just a little bit of exercise. They really drop their risk of dying.
n/a That's about a 20% risk reduction in that first steep curve. They've done studies looking at what amount of exercise is needed for people. This graph kind of shows that the sweet spot where you get a big reduction of risk and then after that Sweet spot doesn't go down very much, so doing extra exercise doesn't necessarily benefit you. It's really between a 300 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. I'm gonna go over what that means later in the talk, but Moderate activity is when you can talk, but you can't sing.
n/a So when you could, you know, Sorry. Where you can talk but you can't sing is moderate activity. And then if you can't talk at all, that would be intense activity. So, this is also a study from the same paper that showed that for all of these different types of cancer listed here on the left, that if you exercise of that 150 minutes a week, that same amount that they kind of studied, that the risk of getting these types of cancer was reduced. Again, this is 1 of those plots where the line down the middle here is no effect.
n/a If it's to the left, it's protective and a decreased risk. And if it's to the right, it's an increased risk. The 1 cancer that they really saw an increased risk of leisure time activity was with melanoma. That's because when people are exercising outside, they might have more sun exposure. So they think that the melanoma risk is increased just from extra sun exposure.
n/a So the moral to that story is to wear sunscreen and go out and exercise. But all of these different cancer The risk was decreased by exercising at that moderate activity, 150 minutes per week.