It’s all about movement

American functional medicine practitioner Chris Kresser, MD, recently wrote about this problem “that even marathon runners in training that are mostly sedentary outside of their exercise periods are at an increased risk of disease and early death,” underlying the significance of cutting down sitting times.

It’s quite clearly known through meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials that exercise does improve measures of postprandial (as in post-meal consumption) glycemia, insulin responses, and circulating fat in the bloodstream. Another meta-analysis of over 1 million patients with follow-up times between 2-18 years which looked at all-cause mortality correlated with sitting and exercise times found that moderate exercise, if done daily, suppresses the risk factor of prolonged sitting regardless of the amount of hours spent sitting.

However, if those periods of prolonged sitting stretch out between days, it is the time spent exercising that is suppressed, regardless of its intensity.

The trial found that after 3 days of sitting 13 hours a day and taking less than 4,000 steps, a fourth day exactly the same, or with a 60-minute run at 60% maximum heart rate, created no noticeable difference, and that the exercising did nothing to improve metabolic health conditions. This is so-called exercise resistance, which the study, limited in its scope, could not expound upon beyond merely hypothesizing.

Exercise, the authors write, increases the production and circulation of molecules in the blood that clear away macronutrients, such as glucose transporter proteins like GLUT4, which clear away carbs and sugars, or lipoprotein lipase which clears triglycerides. The relative lack of these markers in the blood of the sedentary individuals could mean that something is dampening this key function of exercise.

“This may indicate that someone who sits throughout the week and chooses to exercise on the weekend (e.g., the “weekend jogger”) may not derive the full health benefits of the exercise,” they write.

Kresser suggests an aim for walking about 10,000 steps a day and standing for about half of the day, as well as modifying daily habits to increase walking behavior or remove sitting behavior such as buying a standing or treadmill desk, parking a mile from the office and walking there, using the stairs instead of the elevator, or going on walking lunches/meetings. WaL

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