Smoking or Sitting, which is worse?

It is well-established that smoking is hazardous to human health and is a major preventable cause of premature deaths.

For years now, researchers have confirmed that smoking increases one’s risk of mortality. Both heavy smoking, and more recently low-intensity smoking have been linked to increased occurrences of death in various populations.

It has also been said that “sitting is the new smoking”, that sedentary behavior is just as bad for one’s health. Internal studies conducted by our data science team have shown that sitting, is actually in fact worse. Vivametrica’s founders have been studying the effects of physical activity on health and chronic disease for over 20 years, this research has been the basis of our proprietary risk analytics. More interest in studying the impact of sedentary behavior on human health has arisen. Sedentary behavior has been shown to be an independent predictor of mortality in patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Another study, which looked at the combined effects of watching TV with smoking found these factors to be co-morbid in cancer-related mortality.

Vivametrica conducted a study using 10-year mortality data to compare our risk prediction model to a traditional insurance risk model (>2000 person sample). The initial data sample, including wearable device data, was collected 10 years ago. As part of this study, we also performed individual variable assessments to determine the effects of specific factors on mortality.

Steps-per-day (habitual physical activity) was the strongest predictor of mortality. Individuals who took fewer steps than the average for their age and gender were 5.4x more likely to die after 10 years compared to those who took more steps. When we looked at smoking status alone, we found that smokers were 1.2x more likely to die after 10 years compared to non-smokers. From these results, it can be said that physical activity has a greater impact on overall all-cause mortality than smoking in this study. Thus, increasing efforts to modify sedentary behavior with smoking cessation can help people to live longer. Getting people to move more seems to have an even bigger impact than stopping cigarette use.

Originally published at the Vivametrica Blog.