Standing Desks Kill People, New Report Says

If your name is Barbara from accounts receivable, you dabble with morbid obesity but you drink Diet now so it’s all good, and you plan on dying self-impaled on a plastic ficus in your cubicle surrounded by NCIS paraphernalia, you probably love a good standing desk. If your name is Keith from marketing, you bought your shirt out of a shoebox at Ross Dress for Less, and you take online business classes that you found advertised in a pop-up window, you definitely love a standing desk. Basically, every person in corporate America covets the too-good-to-be-true lifelong health benefits of a standing desk, which has become more than just a recruitment tool for companies – it’s a mantra for any person willing to believe he can take control of his life by standing at a desk.

But people might have to find another way to live out a tragic Dilbert-worthy gag now that a new study proves what researchers have been screaming for a while. Standing desks kill people. The American Journal of Epidemiology points to the cardiovascular risks associated with prolonged periods of standing. The 7,320 Standers who participated in the study over twelve years were found to be twice as likely to develop heart disease as Sitters. The good news is that if you sit down you can take up smoking again, according to researcher Peter Smith:

In fact, the incidence of heart disease among those respondents who stood a lot at work (6.6 percent) was similar to the incidence of heart disease among workers who smoked on a daily basis (5.8 percent) or those who were obese (6.9 percent.)

Smith follows up with the sass attack:

Luckily for workplaces, in the case of prolonged standing, there are interventions that are known to be effective and readily available. They’re called chairs.

The bad news is that people who sit too long are also killing themselves. We weren’t meant to sit all day. But we weren’t meant to stand all day either. We were meant to – and this is going to be a tough pill to swallow – move our asses. Sorry Barbara.   

^{Photo Credit: GWA Instagram}