Get on your feet: Scientists have said you could extend your life by two years simply by spending more time standing up
It's enough to make you get up immediately and go for a walk.
Scientists claim that you could extend your life by two years simply by not sitting down for hours on end.
They have discovered that adults who are only seated for a maximum of three hours a day typically live an extra two years.
Watching television has a similar effect, according to the researchers’ calculations.
Those of us who limit our daily viewing to two hours live for nearly a year and a half longer, they claim.
Experts have long blamed our increasingly sedentary lifestyles for rising levels of obesity and a lack of fitness.
This in turn is linked to heart problems, diabetes and many forms of cancer.
And these latest findings will no doubt cause concern amongst office workers who spend most of the day at their desks.
But there is evidence that even simple measures - such as taking the stairs instead of the lift and walking over to speak to colleagues - can help keep the heart healthy.
Only last year the chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies urged workers to stand up whenever they took a phone call to limit the time they spent sat down.
This latest research - published online in the journal BMJ Open - looked at previous studies involving 167,000 adults aged 18 to 90.
They had all compared how much time people had spent sitting down and watching television with how long they had lived.
The researchers from Louisiana University, the US, calculate that 27 per cent of all deaths in America are partly caused by adults spending too much time sitting down.
Similarly 19 per cent of all deaths are in part due to watching too much TV.
Worth watching? The study also said that two hours or less of daily TV viewing could increase your lifetime by nearly 18 months
They concluded: ‘The results of this study indicate that extended sitting time and TV viewing may have the potential to reduce life expectancy in the US.’
