Three-minute breaks from work counteract the harmful effects of sitting

Fortunately, frequent breaks from sitting improve blood sugar and cholesterol control, according to previous studies. But much of this research took place in university labs and only lasted a day or two, conditions that do not reflect real life.

So for the new study, published last month in The American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism, an international consortium of scientists, led by researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, decided to see what happens. would spend if office workers agreed to interrupt their sitting time, over three weeks, in their usual place of work.

They started by recruiting 16 middle-aged men and women in Stockholm with sedentary office jobs and a history of obesity, putting them at high risk for metabolic problems like diabetes. They checked the volunteers’ current metabolic health and asked them to wear activity monitors for a week, to get baseline numbers.

Then half of the volunteers went on with their normal lives, as a control, and the rest downloaded a smartphone app that alerted them every 30 minutes during the working day to get up and be active for three minutes. They wandered the hallways, walked the stairs, walked in place, crouched, hopped or strolled in any way they found convenient, tolerable, and not too distracting or entertaining for their co-workers. But they had to take at least 15 steps before the app registered their movement as a break from activity.

The experiment continued for three weeks, after which everyone returned to the lab for another round of metabolic testing. The researchers found that the results of the two groups diverged subtly. The control group had persistent problems with insulin resistance, blood sugar control and cholesterol levels. But the other volunteers, who had stood and moved at work, had lower fasting blood sugar levels in the morning, meaning their bodies had better blood sugar control at night, a potentially important indicator of metabolic health. Their blood sugar levels also stabilized during the day, with fewer peaks and drops than in the control group, and the amount of beneficial HDL cholesterol in their bloodstream increased. These improvements were slight, but could mean the difference, over time, between progression to full-blown type 2 diabetes or not.