Spend less time sitting; cumulative weight gain; ancestors and our microbiome; new look biobanking
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This is an ABC podcast.
Hello and welcome to this week's Health Report with me, Norman Swan.
And me, Tegan Taylor.
today the extraordinary story of the microbiome in our mouths amazingly many of the bugs in our mouths are similar if not identical to what our ancient primate primate ancestors had in their mouths
and how young women are putting on more weight faster than the cohorts who went before them
brain banking not just a repository of human brains far more sophisticated than that and the latest research on sitting Professor David Dunstan and his colleagues at the Baker Institute in Melbourne have published a review of the evidence on the toxicity of sitting for long periods, the relationship with physical activity in general, and just what it means to get off your bottom. David, welcome back to the Health Report.
Thanks for having me.
So what is it about sitting?
Well, sitting, well, if you put it down to the most basic, it is the absence of our skeletal muscle activity. And that can have enormous consequences for a number of the body's regulatory systems, particularly blood pressure and blood glucose control.
I'll come back to what the consequences are. But in previous papers I've read on this, in fact, and covered on the health report, it appears that sitting is contextual. That if you're sitting in front of, you know, you're at work in front of the computer, it seems to be less toxic than if you're sitting in front of the telly.
Yeah, for some outcomes, particularly those mental health outcomes, there appears to be some evidence showing that those more passive type of sedentary behaviours, like you mentioned, television viewing time, appear to be detrimental to mental health outcomes, whereas the reverse is true for those more cognitive stimulating sedentary behaviours, like working on a computer and reading a book, for example. So that's for the mental health outcomes. I
thought obesity was more likely if you were sitting in front of the telly or a gaming console.
Well, that's not one that I'm familiar with. But, of course, long hours spent in sedentary behavior is likely to be conducive to increasing risk.
So give me the list of problems.
So there's now pretty strong evidence showing that excessive sitting is associated with a host of health conditions like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, some cancers. But importantly, perhaps where the strongest evidence exists is that there is an increase in the risk of early mortality. So I think we've now got even stronger evidence to really understand emphasize that message that sitting does increase the risk of a number of chronic conditions.
Now, but it's not independent of your general physical activity because, again, what we probably covered a little while ago was that you can counter the effects of sitting by going to the gym or getting exercise every day.
Yeah, so we've become more sophisticated in how we measure this in large populations. And the evidence does appear to be that those who are more very physically active, so for instance, they're getting that 60 to 90 minutes per day of moderate activity, that appears to cancel out the health hazards of too much sitting. But at the other end of the spectrum, those who are highly physically inactive have the greatest risk associated with too much sitting. So really, we should be concentrating on both of these behaviours, inactivity and also getting people to sit less and move more.
So the question is, is it sitting? Is there an independent effect of sitting versus physical inactivity? Because there's been a controversy over standing because people have said, well, you know, there was a whole fad at one point or a phase at one point where everyone was getting a standing desk. I'm standing at a standing desk right now. And people say, well, standing actually didn't pay off in terms of not sitting because you end up just standing still rather than moving around.
Yeah, so I think it does depend on the outcome that you're looking at. For instance, for bone health, that standing may be beneficial.
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