With out query, inactivity is unhealthy for us. Extended sitting is constantly 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 trendy instances, sitting is tough 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, a minimum of you are able to do it whereas in your toes, the considering goes.
Nonetheless, research on whether or not standing desks are useful have been sparse and typically inconclusive. Moreover, extended standing can have its personal dangers, and knowledge on work-related sitting has additionally been blended. Whereas the ultimate verdict on standing desks continues to be unclear, two research out this 12 months supply among the most nuanced proof but in regards to the potential advantages and dangers of working in your toes.
Take a Seat
For years, research have pointed to standing desks enhancing markers for cardiovascular and metabolic well being, resembling lipid ranges, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the power of arteries to widen in response to elevated blood movement). However it’s unclear how important these enhancements are to averting unhealthy well being outcomes, resembling coronary heart assaults. One 2018 evaluation advised the advantages is likely to be minor.
And there are truthful causes to be skeptical about standing desks. For one, standing—like sitting—shouldn’t be shifting. If a scarcity of motion and train is the foundation downside, standing nonetheless would not be an answer.
But, whereas sitting and standing can arguably be mixed into the only class of “stationary,” some researchers have argued that not all sitting is identical. In a 2018 place paper revealed within the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medication, two well being specialists argued that the hyperlink between poor well being and sitting may come all the way down to the particular populations being examined and “the particular contribution” of “sitting time at house, 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 blended outcomes. For example, a 2013 evaluation didn’t discover a hyperlink between sitting at work and heart problems. Although the examine did recommend a hyperlink to mortality, the hyperlink was solely amongst girls. There was additionally a 2015 examine on about 36,500 staff in Japan who have been adopted for a median of 10 years. That examine discovered that there was no hyperlink between mortality and sitting time amongst salaried staff, professionals, and individuals who labored at house 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, newer 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 places of work, the place individuals do not all the time have the posh of frequent motion breaks. And this, in flip, has stored researchers on their toes to attempt to reply whether or not there may be any profit to standing desks.
