Breaks to get up and move good for health: Study

Taking a break to walk every 20 minutes instead of staying seated for hours helps reduce the body's levels of glucose and insulin after eating, according to a study - the latest to highlight the hazards of long periods of inactivity. Though the results, published in the journal Diabetes Care, don't show whether these reductions have any lasting health benefits, experiencing large glucose and insulin spikes after a meal is tied to a greater risk of heart disease and diabetes. "When we sit our muscles are in a state of disuse and they're not contracting and helping our body to regulate many of the body's metabolic processes," said David Dunstan, a professor at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Dunstan and his colleagues have reported previously that people who watch more than four hours of TV a day are likely to have an earlier death. With this study, they experimented with how prolonged sitting could affect responses to food. After a meal, glucose levels in the blood go up, followed by a rise in insulin, which helps cells use blood sugar for energy or store it. Then, levels in the bloodstream start to go down. In people with type 2 diabetes, this process falls out of whack usually because the body no longer responds to insulin properly. After a meal, blood sugar and insulin levels spike and remain high