“As time goes on and people are getting less active and more overweight, the number of people at risk for diabetes is increasing by leaps and bounds. It’s not a rare group of people” who will be exposed to increased diabetes risk due to their sedentary habits, Kriska said.
The new study relies on data from participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program, a federally funded study published in 2002. That study included slightly more than 3,200 overweight U.S. adults between 1996 and 1999. The study’s goal was to delay or prevent type 2 diabetes in high-risk patients, either with the diabetes drug metformin or via lifestyle changes.
Eating right and engaging in physical activity proved the most successful route, resulting in a 58 percent decrease in the development of diabetes compared to doing nothing. By comparison, metformin caused only a 31 percent decrease in diabetes development, Kriska said.
Since they’d proven that physical activity can forestall diabetes, researchers decided to take the opposite tack and explore whether sitting around for extended periods can raise diabetes risk, said study author Bonny Rockette-Wagner, director of physical activity assessment at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.
Prior research has indicated that long periods spent sitting motionless can have negative effects on metabolism, Rockette-Wagner explained.
“If you think about it, we all recognize the fact that when we sleep our bodies are at rest, and everything sort of slows down,” she said. “When we’re sitting for long periods of time, our body also starts to slow down. It might not be in a sleeping state, but it goes into a more rested state and things start to slow down.”
Prior to the study, participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program all spent the same amount of time watching TV, an average of 140 minutes per day.
Cut Off The TV & Cut Your Diabetes Risk was originally published on blackdoctor.org
