Health
When you sit in the office all day without leaving your desk, you are seriously undermining your health, experts warn.
Australian scientists have found that we should take breaks every 20 minutes to walk and warm up, as this will help lower blood sugar and insulin levels after eating.
When we sit, our muscles are in a state of inactivity, they do not contract and do not help our body regulate many metabolic processes. And a strong increase in glucose and insulin levels after eating increases the risk of heart disease and diabetes.
Professor David Dunstan, from the Baker Institute for Heart Disease and Diabetes Research in Melbourne, Australia, and his team discovered early on that people who watch TV is an average of 4 hours a day, and they die earlier than others. In a new study, researchers tried to find out how prolonged sitting affects the response to food.
They observed and found that blood sugar levels rose after eating, followed by an increase in insulin levels, which helps cells use glucose from the blood for or for energy conservation. Then his level starts to drop.
In people with type 2 diabetes, this process is impaired because the body stops responding to insulin properly. After eating, these people's sugar and insulin levels increase significantly and remain at high levels.
The researchers followed 19 adult participants who did little or no exercise and asked them to sit for 7 hours, measuring their blood sugar and insulin levels every hour.
After two hours of sitting, they drank a drink full of sugars and fats containing 763 calories, and then sat for another five hours. Each participant went through 3 days of the experiment, and each day was separated by a week or two.
One day, they sat all this time, taking a break just to go to the bathroom. The next day, they stopped sitting and took a 2-minute break to walk every 20 minutes after a drink. On the third day, they took the same breaks, but did more active activities.
On days when participants did not get up from the table, their sugar levels rose from 5 mmol/l to 8 mmol/l an hour after they drank the drink. On days when they got up every 20 minutes, their blood sugar levels increased from 5 mmol/l to 7 mmol/l.
Overall, breaks and light physical activity reduced the overall increase in sugar by an average of 25 percent, compared to the group that sat all the time.
The same thing happened with insulin. Two hours after participants drank the drink, insulin levels were at their highest, but they rose even more as participants continued to sit.
Scientists have explained that the golden rule for everyone should be: get up every 15 minutes, if only to walk around the room.