This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.More About the Budget and Health
In 2009 Dr. Dean Ornish testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Here’s the crux of what he argued: “Last year, $2.1 trillion were spent in this country on medical care, or 16.5% of the gross national product, and 95 cents of every dollar were spent to treat disease after it had already occurred. Heart disease, diabetes, prostate/breast cancer, and obesity account for 75% of these health care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle.” (Here’s the full text of Orish’s testimony.)
25 Facts That Show The U.S. Health Care Industry Is One Giant Money Making Scam
- The FDA reported 1,742 prescription drug recalls in 2009, which was a gigantic increase from 426 drug recalls in 2008
- There were more than two dozen pharmaceutical companies that made over a billion dollars in profits in 2008
- Between 2000 and 2006, wages in the United States increased by 3.8%, but health care premiums increased by 87%
- Over the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has risen from about 38 million to about 52 million
- The top executives at the five largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States combined to receive nearly $200 million in total compensation in 2009
We want our doctors to go all-out for our loved ones and ourselves. But as voters and consumers, we send a different message. We pick politicians who promise to cut taxes, and we demand low-cost insurance. We're telling government and the healthcare industry to hold the line on healthcare costs, even if it means sacrificing clinical benefits. And we put doctors in the middle of this contradiction.
In recent weeks, private insurers have revealed plans for double-digit rate hikes. Our medical bills are already close to a fifth of our national income, on track to reach one-third within 25 years. Soaring Medicare and Medicaid costs are the main reason for nightmarish federal deficit projections over the long term. Yet as Republicans and Democrats battle over the federal budget to the point of threatening a government shutdown, serious healthcare spending cuts remain unspeakable.
No comments:
Post a Comment