Breaking Up Sedentary Time With Exercise Snacks

This transcript has been edited for clarity. Today we're going to talk about snacks, and I don't mean pretzels or potato chips. I mean "exercise snacks": a way to mitigate the effects of long, extended periods of sitting, or to say it a different way, sedentary time. The average American adult spends hours a day seated, and that is not a good thing. We know that sedentary time has a lot of adverse health consequences. Extended periods of sedentary time can double the risk for diabetes. It increases the risk for obesity with metabolic complications and cardiovascular mortality. It's linked to adverse psychological effects, as it's associated with increased levels of anxiety and depression. Sedentary time is linked to developing and dying from multiple types of cancer, including endometrial cancer, colon cancer, and postmenopausal breast cancer. It also has adverse neurologic consequences, as it's associated with Parkinson's disease and dementia. It's even associated with an increased risk for all-cause mortality. This is delineated in a number of studies and has been codified in the World Health Organization's recommendations on physical activity and sedentary behavior. But we need to sit a lot as a part of our modern society. We need to get work done. So, what can we do to mitigate the ill effects of prolonged sitting? Here's where it becomes interesting. There's pretty good evidence from prospective intervention studies that short periods of activity decrease the metabolic consequences of long periods of sedentary time. Short periods of activity decrease insulin resistance, they improve postprandial blood glucose, and they increase our sense of well-being. So, what do we do about it? Well, the thing to do is figure out times for what have been termed exercise snacks. Exercise snacks is a term for getting up and moving around for about 5 minutes every hour to break up prolonged periods of sitting. It has all the benefits we just talked about. If you're able to get your heart rate up to the level that qualifies as moderate-intensity physical activity, that counts toward your half-hour a day that is recommended as physical activity, according to the latest US Department of Health and Human Services recommendations for physical activity. What is that heart rate? It's 220 minus your age, and then reaching 50%-70% of that number. And how do you get your heart rate to that level during your exercise snack? You can walk up stairs. You can do squats. You can do jumping jacks.So, sitting is a product of modern life, but it's unhealthy. However, there is a path forward to mitigate the effects of prolonged sitting, and all we have to do is walk down that path. For Medscape, I'm Dr Neil Skolnik.