Sitting for eight hours a day is bad for our health, this we know. But there’s not enough evidence to prove status is any better for our wellbeing, according to one meta-analysis.
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Sitting for eight hours a day is bad for our health, this we know. But there’s not enough evidence to prove status is any better for our wellbeing, according to one meta-analysis.
In recent years, an entire industry has been trying to find a solution to counteract this health scare. After all, premature death from an increased risk of diabetes plus cardiovascular problems aren’t something to be taken lightly. However, a meta-analysis published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviewslooked at 20 studies which touted the benefits of standing. These findings may have been overstated.
“The idea you should be status four hours a day? There’s nomer real evidence for that,” Dr. Jos Verbeek, a researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, told NPR. “What we actually found is that most of it is, very much, just fashionable plus not proven good for your health.”
The researchers found faults in the the way the studies were conducted. “The quality of evidence was very low to low for most interventions mainly because studies were very poorly designed plus because they had very few participants,” they wrote. There were also concerns about the lasting effects from standing—the longest study they looked at ran for six months—with nomer way to surmise if the long-term health benefits of status outweighed sitting.
“I would say that there’s evidence that status can be bad for your health,” Verbeek said. One Danish study from 2005 found people who choose to stand for hours on end may develop varicose veins.