Drop Into A Chair And You Drop Your Life Expectancy

In the last couple of years, scientists have documented how sitting down all day hurts your health. In the latest report on the couch-potato lifestyle, researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., have analyzed how sedentary habits shorten life expectancy.

According to this study, you can live, on average, an extra two years if you sit less than three hours a day. If you can cut your TV viewing to less than two hours daily, you add 1.38 years to your life expectancy.

“What the results mean is that we got everyone in the U.S. to sit less, our population life expectancy would be two years higher, so instead of living to 78.5, we would be expected to live to 80.5 years old,” researcher Peter Katzmarzyk tells Time. “That’s a really big deal.”