Sitting down on job taking toll on health of British worker

Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times, Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities using one; Winston Churchill in the years after the second World War used one to pen the volumes that cemented his place in history, except when he was writing in bed.

The item in question is the standing desk. In more recent years, it has been used by Hollywood as a must-have accessory for the megalomaniacal tycoon intent on trying to control the world.

Today, however, the British Journal of Sports Medicine reports on guidance offered by British doctors, who argue that workers should spend a minimum of two hours standing during working hours.

Life at work has changed fundamentally over the last five decades: the fall in manual labour means that, on average, workers expend 175 fewer calories per day than their predecessors did in 1960.

If some of the statistics buried in the depths of the report are dry, a few are not. For example, people in the United Kingdom walk 60 miles a year less than they did just 40 years ago.

The differences between people are striking: those who spend much of the day sitting down are twice as likely to develop Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases; they are 13 per cent more likely to get cancer; and 17 per cent more likely to die from it.

Damaged metabolism

Poor posture, the bane of most office workers’ lives, exacerbates the problem, since a person’s metabolism drops to a third of the figures recorded when a person is moving about, even if not very energetically.

Research shows that just four hours each day of sitting down leads to the enzymes responsible for burning fat shutting down and a reduced metabolic rate, while the electricity flow to the legs is also hindered.

The effects of sedentary lives are beginning to be seen clearly in hospitals. In England last year, 6,200 men aged 40-54 were admitted with strokes, according to the Stroke Association, while figures for the over-65s are falling.

“The evidence is clearly emerging that a first behavioural step could be to simply get people standing and moving more frequently as part of their working day,” according to the team led by Prof John P Buckley of the Institute of Medicine at the University of Shrewsbury.

The legacy left by workers’ habits can be discerned by MRI scans. The most sedentary have more fat deposited around vital organs – the heart, kidneys and liver – than those who keep themselves active.

“The most encouraging evidence thus far demonstrates that avoiding long periods of sitting coupled with even short but frequent sessions of more light-intensity movement improves glucose and insulin levels,” today’s report continues.

Two years ago researchers found that seven out of 10 people in Europe and North America with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes or cancer failed to get even 150 minutes of basic exercise throughout the course of the week.

“In the UK, sedentary behaviour now occupies around 60 per cent of people’s total waking hours in the general population, and over 70 per cent in those with a high risk of chronic disease,” says the report.

“For those working in offices, 75 per cent of their working hours are spent sitting, of which more than 50 per cent is accumulated in prolonged periods of sustained sitting; on non-working days, people sit less by up to 2.5 hours,” it goes on.

Today, 131 million working days are lost in the UK because of illness – one quarter are directly blamed on back, neck and muscle pain, though stress, anxiety and depression contribute heavily to the figures, too.

Desk-bound workers

Manual workers are the most likely to be off sick, followed by desk-bound workers, the very ones who spend all day sitting at a desk, tied to a headset, though Australian studies have shown that “standing breaks” and the use of standing desks improve health statistics significantly.

Research has shown that blood glucose and insulin levels, along with muscle and joint function figures, improve with just two hours of standing per day during work, but the biggest improvements of all are recorded among those who stand for four hours.

Furthermore, healthy workers believe their work is better, boosting confidence: “All these examples provide cost savings to both the health service and the employer, along with any knock-on costs to illness or injury that affects the productive lives of [family and close friends],” the study says.

The difficulties caused by the office chair are set to rise as retirement ages will be pushed to 67 for those in Britain retiring between 2034 and 2036, and 68 between 2044 and 2046.