Reconsidering "Reconsidering the sedentary behaviour paradigm"

Earlier this week we posted the abstract of a study concluding that sedentary behaviour may not have health effects independent of physical activity.  David Dunstan and colleagues have responded with a comment on the article, available via PLOS ONE.

From the comment:

Maher and colleagues report findings from a secondary analysis of accelerometer data collected as part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). They found no associations of sedentary time with cardiometabolic risk biomarkers, when controlling for a measure of “total physical activity” that was composed of time spent in both moderate- to vigorous-intensity and light-intensity physical activity (that is, all non-sedentary time), weighted by intensity (accelerometer counts). On this basis, they concluded that sedentary time may not have health effects independent of physical activity. Leaving aside legitimate concerns with interpreting null results in this fashion, a broader conclusion that might be drawn is that there is limited (or no) merit in searching for “independent” effects of behaviours that are unavoidably “interdependent”.

Both the full article and the full comment are available via PLOS ONE.