To stay slim, stand for an hour at work

August 26, 2014  19:49

Workers should stand at their desks for at least an hour a day to prevent obesity and heart disease, according to a top public health expert.

Professor Kevin Fenton warned that spending six or seven hours a day sat down in the office was having a detrimental effect on their health, The Daily Mail reports.

Instead he said they should break up the time by holding stand-up meetings, coffees or lunches or set aside a certain amount of time to work standing up.

He said being active is the ‘miracle cure we’ve been waiting for’ to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and improving mental health.

NHS figures show that more than 40 per cent of women and a third of men do not complete the recommended 30 minutes of exercise five times a week.

This includes a quarter of women and a third of men who are classed as inactive, meaning they do less than 30 minutes exercise on a weekly basis.

Harvard academics have claimed that sitting down for too long is as bad for our health as tobacco because it is directly responsible for more deaths worldwide.

Standing has benefits for improving your posture and therefore back pain, it improves your circulation and therefore cardiovascular health and it also promotes greater mobility in general.

If you are standing you are likely to be moving around a little bit more.

There’s no minimum time for standing but it’s about being mindful about not sitting down for six or seven hours a day.

Standing-up increases the heart rate by about ten beats a minute, which in turn burns an extra 0.7 calories a minute, or 50 an hour.

Professor Fenton said that by standing at their desks, office workers would be inclined to move about more and take the stairs rather than lift.

Going up a typical flight of stairs burns two or three extra calories, which soon adds up if done many times a day.

In 2012 a study by Harvard researchers published in the Lancet medical journal claimed that sitting down had caused more deaths globally than tobacco.

They calculated that 5.3 million deaths from heart disease, cancer and diabetes, would be avoided each year if all inactive people exercised, slightly more than the 5 million deaths annually from smoking.

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