Practical Approaches for Interrupting Prolonged Sitting to Improve Postprandial Glucose and Protein Metabolism

Sedentary behavior is an independent risk factor for chronic disease and premature mortality. Despite a growing awareness of the health risks associated with prolonged sitting, Americans spend upwards of 10 hours per day in a sedentary state. Many leisure-time activities and careers of modern society involve prolonged sitting, necessitating an urgent need to identify strategies that mitigate the health consequences of these behaviors. Recent evidence suggests that interrupting prolonged periods of sitting with short breaks of walking or cycling improve postprandial glucose and lipid handling throughout the day. Thus, relatively small quantities of movement represent an efficacious strategy for improving indices of metabolic health. However, more cost-effective and practical interventions that do not require extra space (i.e. walking) or equipment (i.e. cycling or a treadmill desk) beyond one's immediate sedentary space (e.g. office, desk) would help reduce real and/or perceived barriers of adopting this efficacious disease risk-reduction behavior. A currently understudied consequence of prolonged sitting may also be a desensitization of skeletal muscle's ability to use ingested protein, which overtime can result in detriments to the quantity and quality of this important tissue. Body-weight resistance exercise (RE) can augment the body's ability to use ingested protein to support the maintenance of skeletal muscle mass, and therefore may represent a novel exercise mode to minimize consequences of prolonged sitting. The proposed research will be the first to investigate the influence of interrupting prolonged sitting with short breaks of body-weight resistance exercise (RE) on postprandial glucose and protein metabolism. Importantly, the efficacy of this approach will be directly compared to short breaks of walking, which has previously been reported to improve postprandial glycemia in healthy adults.