Get up and move: you need to exercise—your life depends on it - Special - prevent sedentary death syndrome - Interview - Statistical Data Included

Men's Fitness, Jan, 2002 by Ben Kallen

If you read MEN'S FITNESS, you're aware that regular exercise brings plenty of benefits, from better health and mental well-being to improved sex appeal and physical performance. What you may not know is that a lack of exercise--the kind of couch-potato lifestyle that more and more people are leading--can actually bring about an early demise. To call attention to this problem as a vital public-health issue, physiologist Frank Booth, Ph.D., has given it a new name: sedentary death syndrome, or SeDS. We contacted Booth, a professor and researcher at the University of Missouri, Columbia, to find out more.

MEN'S FITNESS: How did you come up with the term "sedentary death syndrome"?

Booth: It came to me when I was out running one day. Steven Blair at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research [in Dallas] had shown that one-third of the deaths from three diseases--colon cancer, coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes--were preventable if people were not sedentary. So I went to the literature and learned that there are 750,000 deaths in the U.S. each year from those conditions. [That] means [annually] 250,000 deaths would be preventable if we could get people to exercise.

Moreover, there are about 35 unhealthful conditions produced by physical inactivity. Not all of them lead to death, but it's clear the American public doesn't realize the extent to which physical inactivity can cause physical problems. Giving it a name, sedentary death syndrome, was a way of publicizing the seriousness of the issue.

Are we becoming more sedentary as a society, even though we're learning more and more about the benefits of exercise?

Right now, it's about flat. The data from the Centers for Disease Control says that the number of people who don't exercise at all, or are exercising less than the surgeon general suggests, is pretty much unchanged.

What do you recommend people do?

It's not anything major; we're not telling them that they have to go out and run marathons. People have to start walking more, gardening more. Walk up stairs instead of taking the elevator. Take your family for a walk around the block. Take your kids to the ballpark and play with them; don't just watch them play. There are levels of health improvement, and you can start slowly with very simple things.

When you put it that way, it seems incredible that so many people aren't doing even that much. It seems so little to ask.

It may seem little, but it's a big difference for people who are sitting all day. And that's the way we've gotten used to living. Our culture has changed. It's great to have computers and TVs and laundry machines and cars, but there's a downside, too. And while we may think everybody's always lived this way, that's not the case. A hundred years ago our ancestors were very physically active, and they didn't get these diseases. Now being sedentary has become a way of life. And it's going to be very hard to reverse for those who've become inactive.

Of course, 100 years ago people weren't living as long as we do now.

Right. But 100 years ago our kids weren't becoming overweight and getting type 2 diabetes--what used to be called adult-onset diabetes. That's a miserable disease to die of, and it's bad for society. Diabetes is a time bomb; it isn't something you recover from, like a cold. If our kids are getting diseases that will manifest in 10 or 20 years, that means they'll be getting sick when they start having kids of their own. There are just so many reasons to say no to [not exercising].

Are you working on any specific public-health initiatives? What are you asking of the government?

The budget of the Centers for Disease Control has only $6.5 million per year to promote physical activity, and even that may be cut in the coming year. I think that's the wrong way to go, especially when you consider that physical inactivity is causing health costs of $200 billion per year. So that's our main interest. We're also pushing a bill called "Physical Education for Progress," which earmarks funding for people looking for ways to improve physical education in schools. Physical education [shouldn't be] where you stand around and watch the best people play; it's where everybody gets to be active, and you make it a lifelong thing because people have fun doing it.

The other thing we're pushing is getting the National Institutes of Health more interested in this as a national problem. Right now, there's minimal to no structure on the issue at NIH. That's important because physicians aren't going to act unless there's evidence-based medicine. We need research showing how exercise affects the body at the molecular and genetic level.

We interviewed an evolutionary biologist ["Evolutionary Fitness," June], and he said that human beings have evolved to conserve energy, so we're essentially programmed to want to do as little exercise as we can get away with. How do you deal with that problem?

Well, he may be right, he may be wrong. I know that one of the things molecular studies are showing is that if you change the level of a certain protein in a mouse's skeletal muscle, the mouse tends to run a lot more. We don't know why this happens: Why does increasing this protein cause the mouse to be voluntarily more active? Modern molecular biology is undergoing a profound change. If we can understand why people are inactive, maybe we can devise therapies that make them want to exercise more.