Moving around leads to longer life
People who move around live longer, and every little thing counts. A study by the University of Pennsylvania says that those who walk around, wash the dishes, or sweep the floor live longer than those who were just sitting on a desk.
The study was from Ezra Fishman, a doctoral candidate in demography at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging and others.
Even for people who already exercised, swapping out just a few minutes of sedentary time with some sort of movement was associated with reduced mortality, according to the research, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
Fishman, part of Penn’s Population Studies Center, and the other researchers looked at data from approximately 3,000 people aged 50 to 79 participants were fitted with activity trackers for seven days. For these same people, the agency then tracked mortality for the next eight years.
They found that the least active people were five times more likely to die during that period than the most active people and three times more likely than those in the middle range for activity.
Though the scientists didn’t discover any magic threshold for the amount a person needs to move to improve mortality, they did learn that even adding just 10 minutes per day of light activity could make a difference. Replacing 30 minutes of sedentary time with light or moderate-to-vigorous physical activity produced even better results.
“You didn’t have to even get a good sweat to experience the reduced likelihood of mortality,” Fishman said. “Activity doesn’t have to be especially vigorous to be beneficial. That’s the public health message.”
“When it comes to physical activity,” Fishman said, “more is better than less, and anything is better than nothing.”
