How a two-minute walk every hour could save your life
Adding only two minutes of walking each hour to your daily routine could help ward off heart disease, diabetes and premature death. It's not a complete substitute for gym time, though.
Spending too long on your backside has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. The good news is, it takes just a modicum of effort to offset these health hazards.
Adding only two minutes of walking each hour to your daily routine just might do the trick, says a study published last week in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
This works out to an extra 400 calories expended each week for the average adult, assuming they are awake for 16 hours a day.
Researchers from the University of Utah School of Medicine thought it would be unrealistic to expect people to replace sitting with more exercise, considering that 80 per cent of Americans fall short of completing the World Health Organisation recommended 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week.
Hongkongers aren't much better: only about one-third meet the recommendations, according to 2014 statistics from the Centre for Health Protection.
With this mind, the scientists investigated the health benefits of a more achievable goal: trading sitting for light activities, such as casual walking, light gardening or cleaning for short periods of time.
They analysed data from 3,243 participants of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, who wore accelerometers that objectively measured the intensity of their activities. The participants were then tracked for three years after the data was collected. During the period, 137 of them died.