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 Researchers put 24 overweight and obese inactive adults with
diabetes through a series of tests. They wanted to see how different
activity levels would affect blood test results that can show when
the body isn’t doing a good job of converting food into energy.
When these people interrupted prolonged sitting with three minutes
of walking or resistance exercises like squats or leg raises, they
had lower levels of sugar, the hormone insulin and the protein
c-peptide in the blood – all of which can be elevated when diabetes
isn’t well controlled.
“Humans are designed to move,” said lead study author Paddy Dempsey,
a researcher at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne,
Australia.
“Our biological systems function optimally when we are regularly
moving and physically active,” Dempsey added by email. “The
prolonged periods of sitting that now characterize much of our day
to day lives – especially our working lives – are missed
opportunities for healthy movement.”
Globally, about one in 10 adults has diabetes, according to the
World Health Organization. Most have type 2 diabetes, which is
associated with obesity and aging and occurs when the body can’t
make or process enough of the hormone insulin.
While previous research has linked inactivity to an increased risk
of developing diabetes and having worse symptoms of the disease,
less is known about the types and amounts of exercise that may be
able to counter some of the ill effects of sedentary time.
For the current study, Dempsey and colleagues monitored signs of
diabetes in the blood after three separate three-day experiments: a
normal sedentary day, or days when participants interrupted their
desk time every 30 minutes with either three minutes of walking or
resistance exercises like squats and leg raises.
The rationale was to try routines that didn’t require special
equipment or huge amounts of space that could easily be performed in
an office or home, Dempsey said.
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Compared with sitting alone, brief bouts of walking and resistance
exercises were both linked to significantly lower blood sugar,
insulin and c-peptide.
Another diabetes sign – elevated triglycerides or fats in the blood
– was significantly lower with resistance exercises but not with
walking, the researchers report in the journal Diabetes Care.
One limitation of the study is that the brief experiments can’t show
the long-term effects on diabetes of brief bouts of exercise, the
authors note. It’s also possible that outside the lab setting, other
factors such as stress might influence how much these bursts of
activity impact diabetes symptoms.
Still, people with diabetes should take the findings as a reminder
to avoid long periods of sedentary time, especially after a meal,
said Bethany Barone Gibbs, a researcher in health and physical
activity at the University of Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved in the
study.
“The good news is, you can break up your sitting with a short walk
or doing resistance exercises in place like squats and calf raises,”
Gibbs said by email.
“So, if you can’t leave your desk or don’t want to leave your
(television) show, you can do some squats, calf raises, etc. in
place,” Gibbs added.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1TZtYBy Diabetes Care, online April 13, 2016.
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