According to a study, not doing physical exercise is worse for health than smoking

Everyone now knows that a sedentary lifestyle is bad. We all know that sitting all day can pose a major risk to your health. But how dangerous is it to be a bit like a couch potato?

A new study has shown that not exercising can be worse for the body than smoking.

Cleveland researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients after death. Each of them had participated in exercise mat tests between 1991 and 2014.

Scientists wanted to test levels of physical activity in relation to the cause of death of patients.

The data show that sedentary people were 500% more likely to die than people in the upper end of physical performance. It's three times more than the risk of smoking.

That does not mean that we should all start blowing 20 times a day. On the contrary, it is time to increase our level of daily and weekly exercise.

Scientists say it is imperative to move and keep moving.

"Extremely high aerobic skills were associated with the longest survival and were associated with benefit in elderly and hypertensive patients," the researchers explain in their findings.

"Cardiorespiratory fitness is a modifiable indicator of long-term mortality, and health professionals should encourage patients to achieve and maintain a high level of fitness."

Dr. Wael Jaber, lead author of the study, told CNN that "being unfit on a treadmill or during a physical stress test has a worse prognosis, until death, than be hypertensive, diabetic or smoker.

"We have never seen anything so pronounced and objective."

Jaber says it's important for the general public to understand how important physical fitness is as a marker of health in general.

"Inaptitude should be considered as a risk factor as important as hypertension, diabetes and smoking, if not stronger than they all are.

"It should be treated almost like a disease that has a prescription called exercise."

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