Keeping Active for Your Liver!

We have all heard the phrase,”sitting is the new smoking.” Our sedentary lifestyles are not good for our waistline and they are even more damaging to our internal organs. Here is a brief summary from a study of sedentary individuals. The findings give everyone another reason to attend a yoga or other fitness class weekly!

From Dole’s weekly newsletter-

“Healthy participants with a variety of different physical activity levels were recruited for a study looking to find connections between liver fat and behavior. If participants had two or less metabolic syndrome characteristics they were considered healthy and if they had three or more, unhealthy, and separated into groups. Metabolic syndrome, in this study, was defined by having high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat, or elevated cholesterol or triglyceride levels.

The metabolically unhealthy individuals had lower physical fitness and higher liver fat. In the unhealthy individuals, for every increase in percent liver fat, the odds of being even more metabolically unhealthy increased by 37 percent. To make things worse, the physical inactivity results were even more eye opening. For every hour of increased sedentary time, liver fat increased by just shy of 1% at 0.87 percent. Interestingly enough, for every increase of 1,000 steps, liver fat ironically decreased by the same amount of 0.87 percent.”

 

http://www.dole.com/Articles/Physical_Activity_and_Reduced_Sedentary_Behavior_for_Liver_Protection