Sitting too long and having lie-ins could take years off your life, new research suggests.

Scientists have drawn up a new list of the factors that raise a person’s risk of an early grave. 

Previous research has identified important risk factors such as alcohol consumption, poor diet, inactivity and smoking which reduce lifespan.

A higher rating in each of the six categories leads participants to being given a higher risk.

A person who has all six bad habits is more than five times as likely to die during a six-year period as one who is very clean-living.

Spending more than seven hours a day sitting, while doing little physical exercise and sleeping for more than nine hours, was almost as deadly.

The researchers said that unhealthy habits are behind a third of deaths.

They also found that participants who scored highly for combinations involving prolonged sitting and long sleep duration along with those who smoking, were the most likely to die early. 

The study adds to growing evidence that going to the gym in the evening doesn’t cancel out the damage done by sitting all day in the office.

The researchers said: ‘This large study reaffirms the importance of healthy lifestyles.’ 

More than 230,000 people aged 45 and over took part in the six-year study.  

Dr Melody Ding, said: ‘To examine specific patterns of lifestyle risk behaviors, 96 variables – representing all possible mutually exclusive combinations of smoking, high alcohol intake, physical inactivity, poor diet, prolonged sitting, and short/long sleep duration – were created.

‘Short and long sleep durations were separated as two different risk factors, as their associations with mortality may be explained by different mechanisms.

‘This analysis investigated four established and two [new] risk factors, namely, prolonged sitting and unhealthy sleep duration, which may be added to behavioral indices or risk combinations to quantify health risk.’

The new study comes after researchers warned last month that excessive TV watching is linked to eight of the major causes of death, including cancer, liver disease and Parkinson’s.

Source: Daily Mail

N.H.Kh