Study Shows Sitting All Day Can Age You By Up To 8 Years

You remember when your parents would yell at you for laying in bed all day? I do.
Sundays were lazy days for me, Monday through Friday my time was occupied with school, my Saturdays were preoccupied with good ol’ wholesome teenage fun.
The Sundays I wasn’t at church bright and early, I found myself glued to my bed.
Even throughout the summer I found myself stuck on the couch in front of the TV or “laid up” in bed glued to Netflix.
Chronicles of a homebody, am I right? My mom never quite understood that, though.
Every day around noon, she would faithfully come in my room, see me in front of the TV and push me to get up and do something.
Back then I wasn’t interested in listening, but recent studies show she may have been on to something.
According to a new study out of the University of California at San Diego, researchers supplied 1,481 older women with accelerometers to measure their movement and then asked them to report how much time they spent sitting a day.
After, they then measured the lengths of the “caps at the tips of DNA strands” or telomeres and found interesting results.
The results showed that people who sat for 10 hours or more a day had  “significantly shorter telomeres.” Interesting thing is that the telomere shortening wasn’t found in people who worked out for half an hour or more each day.
The participants who sat the most, and the participants who exercised the least were on average 170 “base pairs shorter” than people who sat the least.
According to Aladdin H. Shadyab, PH.D and lead author of the study,

“It’s not just quicker aging you need to worry about with shortened telomeres, it’s also been associated with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and premature death.”

Because we are expected to lose about 21 base pairs yearly with regular aging.
These results suggest that the least active participants are 8 years older than their more active counterparts.
So get up, and get moving.