Reducing sedentary behavior and increasing physical activity may be important for maintaining good cardiometabolic health. However, many studies have focused on the independent effect of sedentary behavior and physical activity, but it is unclear whether replacing time spent in sedentary behavior with physical activity is beneficial for cardiometabolic health. Therefore, this population-based cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the effect of behavioral transformations between sedentary behavior and level of physical activity on cardiometabolic health in Korean adults using data from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) 2014-2017. The study participants included 2197 adults from the KNHANES. In the partition model, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was significantly associated with adverse cardiometabolic health, adjusted for potential confounding factors. The odds ratio for adverse cardiometabolic health significantly decreased with the replacement of sedentary behavior and light intensity activity with MVPA in the isotemporal substitution model (p < 0.05). In the models stratified by sex, we observed significant associations between handgrip strength and cardiometabolic health in women (p < 0.001), but not in men. Thus, our findings suggest that replacing sedentary behavior with MVPA may contribute to improved cardiometabolic health.
Keywords: KNHANES; accelerometer; cardiometabolic health; physical activity; sedentary behavior.