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

Without question, inactivity is atrocious for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular illness and death. The evident effect to this frightful destiny is to not sit—move. Even a fewer moments of exercise tin person benefits, studies suggest. But successful our modern times, sitting is hard to avoid, particularly astatine the office. This has led to a scope of strategies to get ourselves up, including the emergence of lasting desks. If you person to beryllium tethered to a desk, astatine slightest you tin bash it portion connected your feet, the reasoning goes.

However, studies connected whether lasting desks are beneficial person been sparse and sometimes inconclusive. Furthermore, prolonged lasting tin person its ain risks, and information connected work-related sitting has besides been mixed. While the last verdict connected lasting desks is inactive unclear, 2 studies retired this twelvemonth connection immoderate of the astir nuanced grounds yet astir the imaginable benefits and risks of moving connected your feet.

Take a Seat

For years, studies person pointed to lasting desks improving markers for cardiovascular and metabolic health, specified arsenic lipid levels, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the quality of arteries to widen successful effect to accrued humor flow). But it's unclear however important those improvements are to averting atrocious wellness outcomes, specified arsenic bosom attacks. One 2018 investigation suggested the benefits mightiness beryllium minor.

And determination are just reasons to beryllium skeptical astir lasting desks. For one, standing—like sitting—is not moving. If a deficiency of question and workout is the basal problem, lasting inactive wouldn't beryllium a solution.

Yet, portion sitting and lasting tin arguably beryllium combined into the azygous class of “stationary,” immoderate researchers person argued that not each sitting is the same. In a 2018 presumption paper published successful the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2 wellness experts argued that the nexus betwixt mediocre wellness and sitting could travel down to the circumstantial populations being examined and “the peculiar contribution” of “sitting clip astatine home, for example, the ‘couch murphy effect.’”

The 2 researchers—emeritus professors David Rempel, formerly astatine the University of California, San Francisco, and Niklas Krause, formerly of UCLA—pointed to respective studies looking specifically astatine occupational sitting clip and mediocre wellness outcomes, which person arrived astatine mixed results. For instance, a 2013 analysis did not find a nexus betwixt sitting astatine enactment and cardiovascular disease. Though the survey did suggest a nexus to mortality, the nexus was lone among women. There was besides a 2015 survey connected astir 36,500 workers successful Japan who were followed for an mean of 10 years. That survey recovered that determination was nary nexus betwixt mortality and sitting clip among salaried workers, professionals, and radical who worked astatine location businesses. However, determination was a nexus betwixt mortality and sitting among radical who worked successful farming, forestry, and sportfishing industries.

Still, contempt immoderate murkiness successful the specifics, much caller studies proceed to crook up a nexus betwixt total prolonged sitting—wherever that sitting occurs—and mediocre wellness outcomes, peculiarly cardiovascular disease. This has kept up involvement successful lasting desks successful offices, wherever radical don't ever person the luxury of predominant question breaks. And this, successful turn, has kept researchers connected their toes to effort to reply whether determination is immoderate payment to lasting desks.