A lot can happen in 20 years.

In 1993, Sunday Adelaja founded a church (in his apartment of all places) with seven other people. By 2013, the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations had 100,000 members in Ukraine alone and 1,000 churches throughout the world.

In addition to creating a megachurch, the Reverend Adelaja has become a prolific writer with more than 80 books - an eclectic mix of self-help, politics, and religion - to his name. He also writes a blog.

In 2015, he made an observation there that is now frequently quoted: “Time is the only commodity in life that cannot be bought, sold, borrowed, given out as a gift, and it cannot be inherited.”

While truer words have never been written, the man writing them is clearly more focused on religious faith than physical fitness. Because if the Reverend tended to his health with a true evangelist’s zeal, he would’ve added something else.

Your time here on earth can be enhanced. It can be extended.

If you commit yourself not to making your life easier but your health better.

While we may not be a nation of only sinners, we are a nation of mostly sitters. Yet according to the PURE cohort study, whose findings were published in this year’s June 15 issue of JAMA Cardiology, too much sitting is a sin in any and all sovereign states if you’re a member of the metaphorical megachurch known as The Grand House of Good Health.

The study followed over 100,000 people from more than 20 countries for an average of 11 years. Those who sat for an average of 6 to 8 hours a day had a 13 percent increased risk of early death and heart disease when compared to those who sat less than 4 hours a day.

Those who sat for more than 8 hours a day had a 20 percent increase.

When the researchers focused on those who sat more than 8 hours a day and exercised the most compared to the other excessive sitters, the 20-percent risk dropped by 15 percent. When the researchers focused on those who sat more than 8 hours per day and exercised the least, it increased by 150.

This idea that exercise can undo the sins of excessive sitting gains even more strength once you read a review published by Lancet on July 27, 2016. It considered 16 studies involving over 1 million people and found the increased risk of premature death that comes with the prolonged sitting so many Americans do as a result of working, commuting, and relaxing to be mitigated by 25 minutes of any sort of daily exercise.

If the daily exercise was at least moderately intense and for 60 minutes or more, the risk of premature death from excessive sitting was eliminated completely.

Now it’s time to take pause from research and take into account one of the great joys in life. Pushing down on the lever that engages the leg rest of your favorite recliner and relaxing after a demanding day.

Whether what comes next is watching the television, searching the internet, or getting lost in a good novel (my clear favorite of the three), we have come to see this end-of-the-day relaxation as an American birthright. And that’s all right.

As long as you exercise regularly, and sometimes huff and puff when doing so.

What’s not all right is eating the typical American diet - unless you believe dying before your time is an American birthright also.

In “Estimating impact of food choices on life expectancy: A modeling study” published in the Feb. 8, 2022 edition of PLOS Medicine, researchers determined that Americans willing to ditch the typical American diet (what researchers now call the Western diet) by age 20 for one viewed as “optimal” increase their life expectancy significantly. For males, it’s 13.0 years; for females, 10.7.

Surprisingly, making the same dietary change at age 60 still increases life expectancy for men and women by 8.8 and 8.0 years respectively.

There’s even good news for bad eaters who don’t want to give up junk food fully. The study found if 20-year-old American junk-food junkies make some “feasible” dietary improvements, males gain 7.3 years of life expectancy and females 6.2.

Some of the changes the researchers deemed as feasible are eating 4.5 servings of whole grains and 4 servings each of fruits and vegetables each day, as well as reducing consumption of refined grains by 50 percent and processed meats, red meats, and sugar-sweetened beverages by 100. If those reductions sound daunting to you, this specific example should make them seem less so.

The “feasible” diet still allows you to guzzle a bit more than 16 ounces of your favorite form of sugar water each day.

P.S.: Last week’s article about creatine contains a typo that I shouldn’t have missed. References to “5 milligrams of creatine” should be “5 grams of creatine” in all instances. Diane Kennedy deserves mention for catching the mistake and notifying me. Thank you, Diane.