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 People should first work toward standing or doing light activity -
like walking - for two hours per day, the panel said in a consensus
statement.
The panel was commissioned by Public Health England and the company
Active Working CIC, which owns the Get Britain Standing campaign.
Too much sitting has been linked to poor health outcomes over the
past several years. Still, no one had set a baseline for just how
much time workers should spend on their feet each day, said Gavin
Bradley of Active Working CIC in Teddington, U.K.
“People weren’t prepared to say what we said, which is how many
hours specifically,” Bradley told Reuters Health.
The specific recommendation may change as more evidence emerges, but
this two- to four-hours-per-day guidance is a good starting point,
he said.
U.K. office workers spend as much as 75% of their time at work
sitting down, the experts said June 1 in the British Journal of
Sports Medicine.
Similarly to prolonged periods of sitting, long periods of standing
should be avoided, according to the panel, which included experts
from several universities and research institutes in the U.K., U.S.
and Australia.
Employers may help their employees achieve the two to four hours of
standing or light activity by changing how and when people can take
breaks that involve standing and movement, or by adopting desk
designs and technologies that allow people to perform their work
more easily in a standing position, the authors write.
“There is good evidence now that too much sitting is associated with
generally poorer health outcomes in the long run,” including poor
bone health, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain cancers,
said Dr. Sebastien Chastin of Glasgow Caledonian University in the
U.K.
Sitting seems to be one of the factors contributing to chronic
disease, Chastin, who was not part of the new statement, told
Reuters Health by email.
“For the last 20 to 30 years the emphasis has been to engage in more
‘purposeful’ exercise,” said Paddy Dempsey of the physical activity
laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in
Melbourne, Australia.
“Exercise is great for health and we will all continue to advocate
for it, but the sad reality is that it hasn’t gotten us all that far
at the population level as many are still not engaging in purposeful
exercise, and are now sitting increasingly more,” said Dempsey, who
was not part of the new statement.
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Breaks in sedentary time should be an additional measure on top of
purposeful exercise, he said by email.
“Research suggests that individuals who are not gaining the benefits
of a physically active lifestyle may at least mitigate some of the
health hazards associated with physical inactivity by standing more
during the day,” said Dr. Lee Smith of the Health Behavior Research
Center at University College London. He was also not part of the new
statement.
“Based on the evidence we have to date, the approximation of two
hours increasing to at least four seems reasonable enough,” Dempsey
told Reuters Health.
We may not be able to pin down the optimal standing time for health
effects yet, but these suggested figures seem to be about right, and
achievable, Chastin said.
Some companies have already started to address the sitting problem,
while others have yet to begin, and the situation can vary greatly
by country, Bradley said. A similar Get America Standing campaign
launches this week.
Education and public campaigns like these may lead to behavior
change, but “it’s going to take us 20 years to get where we need to
be,” he said.
That’s going to require a cultural shift toward understanding and
accepting standing phone calls, walking meetings and going over to a
colleague’s desk to talk instead of emailing them, Bradley said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1AM0a3u
Br J Sports Med 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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