With out query, inactivity is unhealthy for us. Extended sitting is persistently linked to increased dangers of heart problems and loss of life. The apparent response to this frightful destiny is to not sit—transfer. Even just a few moments of train can have advantages, research recommend. However in our fashionable instances, sitting is difficult to keep away from, particularly on the workplace. This has led to a spread of methods to get ourselves up, together with the rise of standing desks. If it’s important to be tethered to a desk, at the very least you are able to do it whereas in your ft, the pondering goes.
Nonetheless, research on whether or not standing desks are helpful have been sparse and typically inconclusive. Moreover, extended standing can have its personal dangers, and information on work-related sitting has additionally been combined. Whereas the ultimate verdict on standing desks remains to be unclear, two research out this 12 months supply a few of the most nuanced proof but concerning the potential advantages and dangers of working in your ft.
Take a Seat
For years, research have pointed to standing desks enhancing markers for cardiovascular and metabolic well being, akin to lipid ranges, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the power of arteries to widen in response to elevated blood movement). But it surely’s unclear how important these enhancements are to averting unhealthy well being outcomes, akin to coronary heart assaults. One 2018 evaluation instructed the advantages could be minor.
And there are honest causes to be skeptical about standing desks. For one, standing—like sitting—is just not shifting. If a scarcity of motion and train is the basis downside, standing nonetheless would not be an answer.
But, whereas sitting and standing can arguably be mixed into the one class of “stationary,” some researchers have argued that not all sitting is similar. In a 2018 place paper printed within the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medication, two well being specialists argued that the hyperlink between poor well being and sitting may come right down to the precise populations being examined and “the particular contribution” of “sitting time at residence, for instance, the ‘sofa potato impact.’”
The 2 researchers—emeritus professors David Rempel, previously on the College of California, San Francisco, and Niklas Krause, previously of UCLA—pointed to a number of research trying particularly at occupational sitting time and poor well being outcomes, which have arrived at combined outcomes. As an illustration, a 2013 evaluation didn’t discover a hyperlink between sitting at work and heart problems. Although the research did recommend a hyperlink to mortality, the hyperlink was solely amongst girls. There was additionally a 2015 research on about 36,500 staff in Japan who had been adopted for a mean of 10 years. That research discovered that there was no hyperlink between mortality and sitting time amongst salaried staff, professionals, and individuals who labored at residence companies. Nonetheless, there was a hyperlink between mortality and sitting amongst individuals who labored in farming, forestry, and fishing industries.
Nonetheless, regardless of some murkiness within the specifics, more moderen research proceed to show up a hyperlink between whole extended sitting—wherever that sitting happens—and poor well being outcomes, notably heart problems. This has stored up curiosity in standing desks in workplaces, the place folks do not at all times have the luxurious of frequent motion breaks. And this, in flip, has stored researchers on their toes to attempt to reply whether or not there’s any profit to standing desks.
