Study: Sit less, live longer (CNN) — What would happen if the
entire population of adults in the U.S. reduced the amount of
time they spent sitting or watching television? Researchers,
whose work is published in the British Medical Journal Open, say
Americans may live longer. They estimate a gain of two years to
life expectancy for reducing sitting to less than three hours a
day, or an additional 1.38 years if everybody limited the time
they spent plopped in front of the television to two hours.
“Right now, if you’re born in the U.S. this year, your life
expectancy is 78.5 years,” said Peter Katzmarzyk, Professor of
Epidemiology at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana. “What we’re saying is, if you got everyone in
the U.S. to sit less, that population-level life expectancy
would be two years higher. Our life expectancy as a country
would be 80 years.” Keep in mind that this research is based on
associations, not causes. The researchers did not prove that
sitting more is the cause of