Dec 11, 2015 10:40 AM EST
More Than 9 Hours of Sleep or Sitting More Than 7 Hours a Day Can Lead to Early Death According to Experts

Living a busy life and less time to rest can take a toll on our health.  Many people these days don't even have time to exercise and eat on time. How else can we make sure to be well rested at all times? The best answer is sleep. It is recommended that a person should have at least 8 hours of sleep per night. However, in an article in India Times said that if you have 9 hours of sleep or sit for a long time, it can lead to dying at an early age. Researchers warns that sleeping more than nine hours and sitting too much the whole day, which shows a sedentary and lazy kind of lifestyle can indeed lead to dying.

According to Sax Institute's "45 and Up Study", non-profit organization said that a person who sleeps or sits too much and not physically active enough has a 4 times more likely to die early as compared to a person who lives a healthier lifestyle.  Sitting for more than seven hours per day and having too little exercise means it's about 150 minutes a week and when you add a lack of proper exercise, the effect is huge.  Lead author Dr. Melody Ding said, "This is the first study to look at how those things (sleep and sitting) might act together." Dr. Ding added "Our study shows that we should really be taking these behaviors together as seriously as we do other risk factors such as levels of drinking and unhealthy eating patterns." Her colleagues from University of Sydney studied 230,000 participants and their health behavior.

They checked the lifestyle behaviors like smoking, alcohol intake, poor diet, lack of physical activity and of course adding too much sitting time plus either too much or too little time to sleep. Study co-author professor Adrian Bauman said "The take-home message is that if we want to design public health programs that will reduce the massive burden and cost of lifestyle-related disease we should focus on how these risk factors work together rather than in isolation."

"Better understanding what combination of risk behaviors poses the biggest threat will guide us on where to best target scarce resources to address this major - and growing - international problem," the authors noted in a paper published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

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