Sitting For Too Long Can Affect Your Liver, Study

Sitting on your butt may feel nice, but it can lead to heart disease, obesity, diabetes - and even affect your liver.

If you sit for more than 10 hours a day, you tend to develop Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), according to a new study by Dr. Seungho Ryu, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Kangbuk Samsung Hospital in South Korea, has found that

"The amount of time spent doing sedentary activity such as sitting at a computer or watching TV has increased dramatically in recent years." Now, "more than half of the average person's waking day involves sedentary activities," said Ryu, according to Live Science.

"Our body is designed to move, and it is not surprising that sedentary behavior, characterized by low muscle activity, has a direct impact on physiology," wrote Michael Trenell, a professor of metabolism and lifestyle medicine at Newcastle University in England, in an editorial accompanying the study published in the Journal of Hepatology.

Scientists studied 140,000 Koreans through an international Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form. They conducted an ultrasonography in order to assess the presence of fatty liver, finding almost 40,000 had NAFLD.

"We found that prolonged sitting time and decreased physical activity level were positively associated with the prevalence of NAFLD in a large sample of middle-aged Koreans," said lead author Ryu, according to hngn.

"Our findings suggest that both increasing participation in physical activity and reducing sitting time may be independently important in reducing the risk of NAFLD, and underlines the importance of reducing time spent sitting in addition to promoting physical activity," added Dr. Yoosoo Chang, in Medical Express.