Lack of exercise is as harmful as smoking and drinking alcohol!

We often hear that sleep is the best medicine. But new research suggests that too much sleep can be bad for your health. Sleeping more than nine hours a night – combined with too much sitting during the day and a lack of exercise – can be as bad for your health as smoking and drinking.

Sedentary people are four times more likely to die early.

Over the past few years there has been growing evidence that sitting too much is harmful to your health.

The University of Sydney study is the first to look at the impact of both sleep and sitting on health.

Dr Melody Ding and colleagues looked at the health behaviours of more than 230,000 participants in the '45 and Up Study' - Australia's largest study of health as we age.

Research shows we need to take these behaviors (sleeping and sitting) as seriously as risk factors like alcohol consumption and unhealthy eating.

Researchers analyzed lifestyle behaviors known to increase the risk of the disease – including smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, poor diet and lack of physical activity.

They also add too much sitting time and too little or too much sleep into the equation.

The authors also looked at different combinations of risk factors to determine which groups of factors most likely increased the risk of premature death, identifying excessive sleep, prolonged sitting and lack of exercise as the “deadly trio.”

However, the study also found that sleep deprivation – less than seven hours a night – also quadrupled the risk of early death, when combined with smoking and heavy drinking.

Other harmful combinations include physical inactivity and too much sleep; physical inactivity and too much sitting; and smoking combined with excessive alcohol consumption.

The combination of too much sleep and too much sitting – and lack of exercise – is as dangerous as smoking and drinking too much alcohol. Both combinations are strong risk factors for disease.

“The message from this study for clinicians, health policy makers and researchers is that if we want to design public health programs to reduce the burden and costs of lifestyle diseases, we need to target how these risk factors work together, rather than on each one in isolation,” said study co-author Professor Adrian Bauman.

Non-communicable diseases – which include heart disease, diabetes and cancer – now kill more than 38 million people worldwide. They cause more deaths than infectious diseases.

According to dantri.com.vn