Standing Desks Are Better for Your Health—but Still Not Enough

With out query, inactivity is unhealthy for us. Extended sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The apparent response to this frightful destiny is to not sit—transfer. Even a few moments of exercise can have advantages, studies suggest. However in our fashionable occasions, sitting is difficult to keep away from, particularly on the workplace. This has led to a variety of methods to get ourselves up, together with the rise of standing desks. If you need to be tethered to a desk, no less than 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 generally inconclusive. Moreover, extended standing can have its own risks, and information on work-related sitting has additionally been combined. Whereas the ultimate verdict on standing desks continues to be unclear, two research out this 12 months provide a number of 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 health, equivalent to lipid ranges, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the flexibility of arteries to widen in response to elevated blood move). However it’s unclear how important these enhancements are to averting unhealthy well being outcomes, equivalent to coronary heart assaults. One 2018 evaluation suggested the benefits might be minor.

And there are honest causes to be skeptical about standing desks. For one, standing—like sitting—just isn’t shifting. If an absence of motion and train is the foundation drawback, 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 similar. In a 2018 position paper revealed within the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medication, two well being specialists argued that the hyperlink between poor well being and sitting might 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 wanting particularly at occupational sitting time and poor well being outcomes, which have arrived at combined outcomes. As an illustration, a 2013 analysis didn’t discover a hyperlink between sitting at work and heart problems. Although the research did counsel a hyperlink to mortality, the hyperlink was solely amongst girls. There was additionally a 2015 study on about 36,500 workers in Japan who have been adopted for a median of 10 years. That research discovered that there was no hyperlink between mortality and sitting time amongst salaried employees, 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, more moderen research proceed to show up a hyperlink between total prolonged 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 folks 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’s any profit to standing desks.