Keep Moving For Better Health
A few years ago, James Levine, a doctor of endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, sparked a radical change in America’s office furniture. His research had inspired a pile of viral stories cataloging the negative effects of sitting at a desk: leg muscles shut down, blood pressure increases, good cholesterol plummets, your children starve. OK, I made up that last one, but the real takeaway was no less dire. “Excessive sitting is a lethal activity,” Levine, who has studied sedentary behavior for nearly 20 years and is the most widely quoted expert on the topic, told The New York Times in 2011. And the solution—at least the one people heard—was to start standing.
Cue the office makeovers. Over the next several years, workers all across America embraced stand-up desks. At Outside’s headquarters in Santa Fe, our building manager furiously reconfigured work spaces. Desks were removed from their shelving brackets, raised a foot and a half, and remounted. Walking the hallways, I’d do double takes every time I realized that another editor had taken a stand against sitting. Close to half our offices were eventually converted. Good science had spurred a small change that was dramatically improving our health. We were literally rising from the dead!
Or were we? The stand-up revolution was followed by another wave of stories reporting that being on your feet in the same place all day has its own downsides, including increased risk of cardiovascular problems. What’s more, at least at Outside, few people’s habits really changed. This morning, I took a tour around our building to assess our commitment to stand-up desks. In 14 of the converted spaces, editors were either hunched over on stools or perched on chairs that they had elevated to meet the new level. They were still sitting, only higher. In a half-dozen other cases, people had simply lowered their desks back to their old positions. Continue Reading…
