Bob CollinsYou’re going to want to sit down for this:
The office dispute over whether you should stand or sit at your desk is over, a study from Canada has determined.
There’s a little something for everybody in the study. People who primarily stand on the job are twice as likely as people who primarily sit on the job to have a heart attack or congestive heart failure, according to the research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
The study, from the Institute for Work & Health, followed 7,300 workers in Ontario over 12 years.
Even after adjusting for a wide range of factors— personal (e.g. age, gender, education levels, ethnicity, immigrant status, marital status), health conditions (e.g. diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, mood and anxiety disorders), health behaviour (e.g. smoking, drinking, body mass index, exercise) and work (e.g. physical demands, shift schedule) — the risk of heart disease was still twice as high among people who primarily stood on the job compared to those who primarily sat.
In fact, the unadjusted risk of heart disease among people who stood on the job (6.6 per cent, as mentioned above) was even slightly higher than among daily smokers (5.8 per cent).
“A combination of sitting, standing and moving on the job is likely to have the greatest benefits for heart health,” says Smith. “Workplaces need to apply this message not just to workers who predominantly sit, but also — in fact, especially — to workers who predominantly stand.”
Curiously, the combination of standing and sitting resulted in lower cases of heart disease among men, but not among women.
A researcher suggested it’s because many of them are nurses and they’ve got unique stress causing health problems that standing and sitting can’t cure.
Archive: Standing up at work isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (NewsCut)
Standing up against obesity (NewsCut)
