Your health: To stay slim, stand for an hour at work

To stay slim, stand for an hour at work

Workers should stand at their desks for at least an hour a day to prevent obesity and heart disease, according to a top public health expert, the Daily Mail reports.

Professor Kevin Fenton warned that spending six or seven hours a day sitting in the office is having a detrimental effect on workers' health.

Instead, he said, workers should break up the time by holding stand-up meetings, coffees or lunches or set aside a certain amount of time to work standing up.

He said being active is the “miracle cure we've been waiting for” to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and improving mental health.

Harvard academics have claimed that sitting down for too long is as bad for our health as tobacco because it is directly responsible for more deaths worldwide.

“Globally we've become more and more inactive, in part because our jobs are making us more sedentary,” said Professor Fenton. ‘Sitting is a problem. Some authors say sitting is the new tobacco, I wouldn't go that far as it isn't addictive.”

Study: 1 in 7 have ‘sleep drunkenness'

There's a decent chance that you or somebody in your family suffers from “sleep drunkenness,” and may not even know it, reports Newsweek.

Bouts of the condition involve waking up with extreme confusion, disorientation, and sometimes amnesia. If you've ever awaked and turned off your alarm without knowing it, you may have been in this state, technically known as a “confusional arousal.”

New research suggests that this condition is much more common than previously thought. About 15 percent of Americans- — or one in seven people — have had a bought of sleep drunkenness in the last year, said Dr. Maurice Ohayon, a physician and researcher at Stanford Medical School.

This state of “confusional arousal” usually occurs when you wake up somebody suddenly, and they don't know what's going on, or where they are. The condition can cause real problems, especially if it happens frequently; more than half of those who reported experiencing sleep drunkenness said it happened at least once per week.

The extreme confusion lasts for less than five minutes in 37 percent of people. But in one-third of people, it lasts five to 15 minutes.