Do You Have a Sitting Job? You May Have A Higher Risk of Heart Disease!

You may have already heard that sitting is the new smoking or even cancer. Spending a large chunk of your day sitting with not enough physical activity is the newest health concern that has had everyone worried. If you spend most of the day sitting, especially those who have desk jobs coupled with high levels of stress, you could be inviting the risk of several ailments – from obesity to diabetes and even heart disease.A group of researchers have presented a new study at a meeting of the EuroPrevent 2017 in Spain in which they have found a high prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors like smoking, hypertension and dyslipidaemia amongst the working population. The study was conducted on 1,74,329 healthy workers who were classified by their body mass index. 67% were men and 49% did manual work. All the participants were classified as metabolically unhealthy if they met three or more of the following criteria — high waist circumference, increased triglycerides or if they are receiving treatment for hyperlipidaemia, low HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol; high blood pressure or previous diagnosis of hypertension or receiving treatment for hypertension; or high fasting glucose or receiving treatment for diabetes.
(Also read: 10 Tips to Keep Your Heart Healthy)
The results suggest that proportions with overweight, obesity and metabolically unhealthy phenotype were 38%, 16% and 10% respectively. Researchers concluded that there was a consistent link between being overweight and obesity with the number of sick leaves taken by the workers due to non-work-related illnesses. This was found to be true in both metabolically healthy and unhealthy workers.A lot of previous studies have established the fact that a prolonged sedentary lifestyle is bad for your heart. Even if your exercise regularly but you are spending a lot more time sitting behind the computer at your desk with barely any movement through the day. Therefore, it is important to talk frequent breaks from sedentary time. Try walking around for a couple minutes every few hours. It can really revitalize and re-energize you and at the same time allow your body some activity.