The feasible causes of cancer so exhaustively chronicled by the Day-to-day Mail vary from the narrowly targeted (sporting a belt) to the not so effortlessly evaded (getting a man or a woman). This week, the Mail pounced on one more frighteningly generic cause: sitting down. The dangers of doing so had been highlighted in a report from the University of Regensburg in Germany. Drawing on studies involving more than four million participants, the authors identified a significantly more substantial risk of bowel, womb and lung cancers amongst these with the most sedentary lifestyles.
A amount of recent pieces have compared sitting down to smoking, an analogy difficult, I would have considered, by the truth that smoking is now usually done although standing up in the rain, outdoors the back door of the workplace. But the stage is that the cancers and other poor results of a sedentary lifestyle cannot be counteracted by combining a great deal of sitting down with a good deal of exercising, any far more than the effects of heavy smoking can be mitigated by workout. Sitting down is undesirable, and there is a strong mood towards it.
In the most current Vogue, Susie Forbes, principal at the Condé Nast University of Fashion and Layout, enthuses about her treadmill desk, a refinement of the stand-up-sit-down desks (the height can be raised or lowered) now trendy. Forbes writes that virtually “each and every fundamental work function” is perfectly achievable “at a speed of amongst a single and two and a half miles an hour”. And this month’s New Yorker attributes an post by Dan Kois who, having read that sitting down could be fatal, embarked on a month of standing up. We’ll come to his conclusions later.
The proof that standing is excellent for you is traced back to investigation in 1953 that in contrast the well being of bus conductors and bus drivers. Drivers were more than twice as probably as conductors to endure heart attacks. No a single who remembers the old buses will be stunned at this. The conductor was adept at taking fares although the bus cornered sharply, or bounding up the staircase at the back just when you considered they’d forgotten about you and you would not have to shell out. He or she delighted in their own physicality, whereas the driver looked miserable in their lonely eminence at the wheel. Of course, the doomed driver had once been a conductor, so it was a case of be careful what you want for.
Each simple function function is perfectly attainable at a speed of amongst 1 and two and a half miles an hour, claim exponents of the treadmill desk. Photograph: Paul Barton/Zefa/Corbis
Subsequent investigation has underlined the dangers of sitting. Final yr, Dr John Buckley, an exercise physiologist from the University of Chester, carried out a survey in which he asked 10 estate agents to stand up for three hours a day. Their blood glucose levels were lower their heart charges were more rapidly, so they were burning far more calories. Buckley believes that standing aids towards cardiovascular condition and cancer, and boosts productivity.
I put it to Buckley that it seemed perverse to stand when you could sit. God gave us buttocks for a explanation, presumably. Also, don’t organisms naturally seek out rest? “We had been designed to conserve power in circumstances of feast or famine,” he replied. “But now there’s no famine, only feast.”
In Scandinavia, stand-up-sit-down desks are the norm. But in Britain many shop staff come to feel the absence of an ordinary chair. Doug Russell, well being and safety officer for the shop workers’ union, USDAW, told me that “if a work can be accomplished seated, a suitable seat must be supplied”. This was very first laid down in the Workplace, Outlets and Railway Premises Act of 1963, but that seat has to be maintained as match for objective (the goal currently being to sit on it), which is pricey, hence a shortage of seats, resulting in back and joint pains, varicose veins and intense fatigue. “It truly is a perpetual difficulty,” said Russell, who believes that “sitting all day is no worse than standing all day”. I advised Russell that I marvelled at how women serving at division keep attractiveness counters seemed to stand all the time. I actually scour the retailers, looking for a seat, so I can be assured they eventually will be ready to sit down. “Yes,” sighed Russell, “on the beauty counters it truly is considered that the assistants need to be eye-to-eye with the consumers.”
Then why not allow the buyers sit down? I believed of a specified butcher’s shop near my boyhood home in York. There was a wooden chair in front of the counter. When, despatched by my mother to buy a pound of sausages, I sat on it and the butcher stated: “Oi, that is not for you.” The chair was for previous individuals who, soon after a lifetime of functioning in a factory or some other non-sedentary occupation, have been entitled to pursue that humble aspiration of yesteryear: “A great sit down.”
It employed to be assumed that anybody sitting down deserved to be sitting down, so there was no particular virtue in standing up. But now there is, and if the medical arguments have been not so great, I would argue there was a moral dimension to the professional-standing argument. Actually, I am going to argue it anyway.
We take a stand, we stand up for what we think in. We stand up for the judge or headteacher. We stand up a great deal in church, albeit tardily for the drearier hymns. A vicar after explained to me that the purpose the congregation stands for much of the music at Evensong is that, “It truly is not a concert.” That’s also why we never applaud the choir. You’re not meant to be enjoying oneself. On the contrary, you’re mean to be mortified. Guys – some of them – stand up when a girl enters the room, behaviour originating in medieval codes of chivalry. The person standing is in a position to do some services, this kind of as lighting the lady’s fag. We “stand prepared” to do items that is why courtiers stand.
We may suspect some renowned standers of in search of the moral large ground. As foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston liked it to be identified that he required a standing desk for the organization he performed in the small hours, otherwise he would fall asleep. Ernest Hemingway showed off to 1 biographer his “stand-up perform place” that “he had fashioned from the top of a bookcase”. (An ordinary desk getting too effete). Unself-effacing figures such as Philip Roth, Karl Lagerfeld and James Murdoch also use standing desks. Winston Churchill liked to search at galley proofs of his books at a standing desk, but considering that he also worked lying in bed this is forgivable. (I once asked a medical doctor no matter whether lying down counted as becoming “sedentary” along with sitting. “I’m afraid it does,” he stated.)
Difficult stand … in response to the news that terrorism suspects had been standing up for three hours, Donald Rumsfeld responded that he stood for eight each day. Photograph: David Hume Kennerly/Getty
Donald Rumsfeld worked at a standing desk, and in response to the news that terrorism suspects were getting made to stand for three hours, he responded that he stood for eight every day. Such was the mystique surrounding Rumsfeld’s standing that an aide sought to clarify that he didn’t stand all the time, like a horse. He would sit when consuming in a restaurant, for instance.
I am contaminated with the standing morality, too. I pride myself on not becoming a couch potato. I do not view considerably tv. Yes, this is because I prefer going to the pub. But then again I normally stand up at the pub. When I do view Television, I mix it with helpful work this kind of as ironing, and I stand up when performing this. Ironing boards have a minimal setting so that you can sit down while ironing. But you wouldn’t be undertaking the ironing in the 1st spot if you desired to sit down even though undertaking it.
But I am not a standing zealot. I am against people males who not only stand when a woman enters a area, but continue to be standing right up until every single final damned woman in the area has sat down. Only the other day I was berating a manager of a Holiday Inn due to the fact they only had showers and no baths.
I asked Dr Nikki Curtis, a GP with an curiosity in musculoskeletal medication, whether or not we are in danger of more than-rating standing. “Sitting is possibly the worst thing you can do all day, but standing all day is not going to be excellent for anyone with lower-back difficulties or varicose veins. And if you are heart’s not working efficiently, blood pooling in the feet and legs can cause swelling and discomfort,” she mentioned.
Dan Kois did not enjoy his month of standing for the New Yorker. He felt socially awkward standing at the back of the cinema. Men and women going to the loo “eye me like I am a serial killer”. He misplaced weight, acquired muscle, but suffered considerably agony. The crucial, he concluded, is to mix sitting with standing. Curtis agreed. “There ought to be options in the workplace so that everyone can stand, sit, walk.”
There is agreement that if standing is far better than sitting, walking is far better than both, which brings me back to Susie Forbes and her treadmill desk. She was applying her walking abilities to the pavement when I referred to as. That is to say, she had gone out. But she kindly agreed to let me have a go on her desk. Standing on the issue and pressing the start off button, I found myself getting carried backwards away from Forbes’s laptop. I then remembered to walk. But if the laptop had been mine, I would have been tempted, on obtaining a dispiriting electronic mail, to quit walking and allow the screen to recede from me. When I asked Forbes how the machine was benefitting her, she explained: “Ask me in 20 years’ time,” which reminded me of the joke by the American comedian Steven Wright: “Difficult operate pays off in the potential. Laziness pays off now.”
According to the ergonomists, we will all be strolling a lot much more in the potential. Meetings will be held on the move. I envisage taxi drivers stalled on Oxford Street – “Can’t move for all these bloody meetings” the total Residence of Lords shambling along Whitehall. GM Trevelyan had it appropriate in 1918: “I have two medical professionals, my left leg and my right leg.”
Upright desks and treadmills at function is standing really greater for you?
