Smoking is bad, but sitting idle is even deadlier, according to a study

Smoking is bad for your health. You do not need an oxygen tank at your bedside to tell you that. Diabetes and heart disease, obviously not great either.

But it's not so obvious, it's a new study by Dr. Wael Jaber of the Cleveland Clinic, that a sedentary life is worse than the three.

"Being unfit on a treadmill or during a physical exertion test has a worse prognosis, with respect to death, than being hypertensive, diabetic or smoking." current, "he said. "We have never seen anything so pronounced and objective."

The results are particularly troubling in the United States, where we are certainly struggling with a fitness problem. The average body mass index of an American is 28.6, compared to 25.1 in the 1960s. Anything that exceeds 24.9 is considered overweight and over 30 is considered to be coming in. obese territory.

Jaber explained that being unfit, at this point, should be treated as a disease that, thankfully, has a prescription: do some exercise! He told CNN that researchers now had the task of transmitting the risk – not exercising could have a serious impact on longevity – to the general population.

These results were not drawn from a small group either. The researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent a treadmill exercise test between 1991 and 2014.

"People who do not do very well on a treadmill test, said Jaber, are almost twice as likely to have kidney failure on dialysis." In fact, the risk associated with death is 500% more high for sedentary people than better performers.

"If you compare the risk of sitting in the best-performing test, the risk is about three times higher than smoking," Jaber said.

So, why are you sitting reading this? Get out!

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