As you should hopefully know now if you have been following this blog, too much sitting, and in particular prolonged periods of sitting, can increase the risk of an early death. Replacing long periods of sitting with either standing or other physical activity has been shown to produce beneficial effects on a person’s glucose, insulin and lipid (or fat) metabolism in short term laboratory studies. But are there any additional health benefits that can be achieved when people manage to replace their prolonged periods of sitting long-term, and if so what are they? And are greater benefits seen for a person’s health when they replace sitting with stepping, not just standing? The Stand Up Australia research team set out to try and answer these questions by using a method known as compositional data analysis (CoDA). CoDA enables the researchers to simultaneously look at all activities a person does in a 24-hr period, and how this activity distribution is related to the person’s cardio-metabolic biomarkers, such as body weight and cholesterol to name a few. This is the first study to use the CoDA method within the context of a sitting-reduction intervention, and it was published in the March issue of…
