Sitting around and cancer

This story hit all sorts of news media yesterday--

"Prolonged sitting may increase risk of certain cancers"
"The longer you sit, the higher your cancer risk"
"Sitting down too much ups your risk of cancer"

It has always been known that exercise is good. But :

ABCnews said...
So if people get their 45 minutes of exercise in at the gym each day, they'll stay healthy for life, right?

Wrong. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that modern, sedentary lifestyles, even for those with definite exercise routines, may put people at an increased risk of cancer.

The study only looked at colon and breast cancer, but some speculated it could include prostate cancer.

This actually seems plausible to me, looking at it as a risk factor. [Note, I am about to speculate as a non-expert!] When you sit in one place for a long time, you get "pelvic pooling" of the blood. This by itself is not so bad and you offset the effects with exercise. But let's say you're eating some food that's got just a tiny eensy bit of something toxic, maybe pesticide. Then the toxins have a chance to sit around your pelvic region and don't get cleaned up by your liver, until you get around to getting up. OK, so that makes some sense to me for colon and prostate cancers. Not sure why there is a connection to breast cancer. Need some more thought in that area.

For most of my life I've been pretty good about getting in exercise. But I've also had a desk job for decades. Got to get off my butt more often.

Here's a link to one of the articles:

abcnews.go.com/Health/sitting-give-cancer/story?id=14876776#.TrQTRnH-HEN

Meh, it's as if when they cure cancer, something else ugly isn't going to come along. Fact is, we're all going to die. The problem with cancer is that it really puts emphasis on Woody Allen's famous quote, "I don't mind dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Nellie

David:

There is NO DOUBT that a sedentary lifestyle leads to ill health in general, so I suspect the report is accurate.

Mel

Exercise is one of the "big three" that has been shown over and over and over again to help "stack the odds in one's favor" for slowing PC progression (and other cancers), prolonging life, and improving quality of life!

Mel, I think you missed my jest. Not anti-exercise, but so wear of every day, a new "this can cause cancer" scare pops up in the news, and then a month later, a new one contradicts the first one. I think sometimes the media gets hard up for health news, seems like Yahoo News is one of the worse for coming up with half-A stories.

david