You don’t have to look far to find article after article about sitting down is bad for your health. Indeed whilst many of these posts boil down to simple parroting of the same line and then appealing to people to adopt a more active lifestyle the good news is that science is with them, at least on one point. There’s a veritable cornucopia of studies out there that support the idea that a sedentary lifestyle is bad for you, something which is not just limited to sitting at work. However the flip side to that, the idea that standing is good for you, is not something that’s currently supported by a wide body of scientific evidence. Logically it follows that it would be the case but science isn’t just about logic alone.
The issue at hand here mostly stems from the fact that, whilst we have longitudinal studies on sedentary lifestyles, we don’t have a comparable body of data for your average Joe who’s done nothing but change from mostly sitting to mostly standing. This means that we don’t understand the parameters in which standing is beneficial and when it’s not so a wide recommendation that “everyone should use a standing desk” isn’t something that can currently be made in good faith. However preliminary studies are showing promise in this area, like new research coming out of our very own University of Queensland.
The study equipped some 780 participants, aged between 36 and 80, with activity monitors that would record their activity over the course of a week. The monitors would allow the researchers to determine when participants were engaging in sedentary activities, such as sleeping or sitting, or something more active like standing or exercising. In addition to this they also took blood samples and a number of other key indicators. They then used this data to glean insights as to whether or not a more active lifestyle was associated with better health indicators.
As they found this is true with the more active participants, the ones who were standing on average more than 2 hours a day above their sedentary counterparts, were associated with better health conditions like lower blood sugar levels (2%) and lower triglycerides (11%). That in and of itself isn’t proof that standing is better for you, indeed this study makes a point of saying that it can’t draw that conclusion, however preliminary evidence like this is useful in determine whether or not further research in this field is worthwhile. Based on these results there’s definitely some more investigation to be done, mostly to focus on isolating the key areas required to support the current thinking.
It might not sound like this kind of research really did anything we didn’t already know about (being more active means you’ll be more healthy? Shocking!) however validating base assumptions is always a worthwhile exercise. This research, whilst based off short term data with inferred results, provides solid grounds with which to proceed forward with a much more controlled and rigorous study. Whilst results from further study might not be available for a while this at least serves as another arrow in the quiver for encouraging everyone to adopt a more active lifestyle.
