You probably don't want to watch this video sitting down. In fact, you probably won't want to sit down at all after you've seen it.
Unfortunately, AsapSCIENCE is laying out the hard scientific truth about the damage sitting is really doing to our bodies in their latest episode above. And even though we knew it was coming, it's still pretty crazy to see the numbers on the damage sitting does. Not to mention the years it's taking off our lives.
As the episode explains, as soon as you start sitting, electrical activity in your muscles drops significantly and your calorie burning rate reduces to one calorie per minute.
After just three hours, there's a 50 percent drop in your artery dilation and, as a result, a decrease in blood flow around your body.
If you sit for 24 hours straight, the insulin in your body loses nearly 40 percent of its ability to uptake glucose, which increases your risk of type 2 diabetes. And, to be honest, things only get worse from there.
After two weeks of sitting for nearly six hours a day, your "bad" cholesterol increases and the enzymes responsible for breaking down fat decline. And research shows that even exercise can't fully undo the damage on our body.
If you're still sitting down that much one year on, you'll be losing around one percent of your bone mass every year.
Sitting down also impacts the amount of blood, oxygen and feel-good hormones our brains receive.
But perhaps the most shocking part is that scientists estimate that if you spend 10 to 20 years sitting down for 6 hours a day (which, let's face it, is something most of us will do), you may have lost up to seven quality adjusted life years, or years without medical issues or death.
And researchers predict that if we all sat for no more than three hours a day, we'd all live two years longer.
Before you give up hope, thankfully, there are a few scientifically proven solutions which AsapSCIENCE has also kindly put together.
So go and watch the episode above and try not to feel as depressed as we currently do. There's still time to turn it around… right?
And if you want some more punishment, you can also watch this RiAus A Week in Science episode on how we're all going to probably die from sitting down too much.
Source: AsapSCIENCE