In recent years, sitting for long periods of time has gotten a poor reputation among the health-conscious. Some have even called sitting “the new smoking” when it comes to its adverse effects on our health, but a recent study out of Australia is suggesting that’s not necessarily the case when it comes to diabetes.
A 13-year-long study led by University of Sydney researchers looked at nearly 5,000 healthy, middle-aged men. Of the study group, 402 developed diabetes. Researchers found very little association between sitting and their risk of developing the disease once they adjusted for physical activity, quality of diet, employment, drinking and smoking habits, and participants’ body mass index.
“Lifestyle has many components. It’s not all about sitting. For a person who does a lot of exercise, perhaps sitting is of secondary importance,” researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis told Reuters.
Stamakis warns his study’s results “don’t exonerate sitting,” but rather points towards the larger need to better understand the complexity surrounding human health and approaching how to study it.
The study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at the different types of sitting, such as sitting at work or sitting at home and watching television – one of the few long-term studies to do so.
Although sitting at work and sitting at home (but not watching TV) did not result in increased diabetes risk, they did find a “weak association” between time spent sitting at home and watching TV with developing diabetes.
WATCH: Is sitting the new smoking? (Jan. 2015)
“We have very good reasons to believe that the health risks attributed to TV in the past are due to other factors, such as poorer mental health, snacking, and exposure to unhealthy foods advertising,” said Stamatakis.
Stamatakis said one variable to consider was the fact that the men involved in the study were physically active.
“With most white-collar workers forced to spend many hours each day in front of a computer not moving, this amount of physical activity may be an absolute necessity to maintain good health,” he said.
“Rather than being the ‘new smoking,’ we need to think of sitting as an important part of the wider problem of physical inactivity,” he wrote in CNN’s The Conversation.
This echoes previous studies that have come to similar conclusions about physical activity to combat the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle.