Could a treadmill desk save your life?

In 2006, James Levine, a British scientist based at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, conducted a very strange experiment. He wanted to measure something which goes by the cumbersome title of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis ? or NEAT. Essentially, this examines how people move about during an average day ? not when they?re exercising, but when they?re making no special effort to keep fit.

The big problem was just how to do the measuring ? and here Levine hit upon a radical plan. He decided to put his volunteers into specially sensored underwear. This would measure their every waking and sleeping moment. It?s true, he concedes, that the sensored underwear was a bit on the bulky side, but no one seemed to mind.

Levine, incidentally, is no stranger to weird experiments. Aged 10, he?d placed 15 pond snails in a glass tank and tracked their movements every hour across a piece of wax paper. Twelve months and 200 wax paper trials later, he came to the same conclusion that he reached 23 years later in his sensored underwear experiment. All creatures have a biological imperative to move ? and movement, perhaps more than anything else, is good for us.

By the same token, lack of movement is very bad indeed. The NEAT experiment revealed that lean people burn around 350 more calories a day just by fidgeting, pacing about, or walking to the coffee machine. As for the non-lean ones ? or fatties as they used to be known ? they just sat there, getting ever more bloated and unfit.

Sitting down, Levine concluded, is not just bad for people ? it?s a killer. This may seem a bit drastic, but Levine isn?t the only scientist who reckons that being sedentary offers an accelerated route to an early grave. A survey conducted by the University of Hong Kong concluded that you?d actually be better off walking about and smoking than sitting down and doing nothing. Twenty per cent of all deaths of people aged 35 and over were attributable to a lack of physical exercise. As for the likelihood of dying from cancer, that increased by 45 per cent for men and 28 per cent for women if they happened to be inactive.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/569020/s/1aa35165/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Chealth0Chealthnews0C89287450CCould0Ea0Etreadmill0Edesk0Esave0Eyour0Elife0Bhtml/story01.htm

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