Smoking is bad for your health. You don’t need an oxygen tank by your bedside to tell you that. Diabetes and heart disease, obviously not great, either.
But what isn’t so obvious is that a sedentary lifestyle is actually worse than all three, according to a new study led by the Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Wael Jaber.
“Being unfit on a treadmill or in an exercise stress test has a worse prognosis, as far as death, than being hypertensive, being diabetic or being a current smoker,” he said. “We’ve never seen something as pronounced as this and as objective as this.”
The results are particularly troubling in the U.S., where we’re certainly grappling with a fitness problem. The average body mass index for an American male is 28.6, up from 25.1 in the 1960s. Anything over 24.9 is considered overweight and over 30 is deemed to be entering obese territory.
Jaber explained that being unfit, at this point, should be treated like a disease that, fortunately, has a prescription: Exercise! He told CNN that researchers now face the task of conveying the risk — getting no exercise can have a severe impact on longevity — to the general population.
These results were not drawn form a small group, either. Researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent exercise treadmill testing between 1991 and 2014.
“People who do not perform very well on a treadmill test,” Jaber said, “have almost double the risk of people with kidney failure on dialysis.” In fact, the risk associated with death is 500% higher for people with sedentary lifestyle than top exercise performers.
“If you compare the risk of sitting versus the highest performing on the exercise test, the risk is about three times higher than smoking,” Jaber explained.
So what are you sitting around reading this for? Get out there!
Read: Harvard says these 5 things can prolong your life by a decade
