Standing Desks Lower Body Mass Index

OK, the research was done with elementary school kids, not adults, but the findings are worth thinking about: kids who used standing desks for two years had significantly lower BMIs than kids who sat all day. A Texas A&M news release reports that researchers at the school outfitted four classrooms at three elementary schools with standing desks, then followed 193 students from the beginning of third grade to the end of fourth grade. Here’s what they found: students who had the standing desks for both years averaged a three percent drop in BMI while those in traditional desks showed the two percent increase typically associated with getting older. Even those who spent just one year in classrooms with stand-biased desks had lower mean BMIs than those students in traditional seated classrooms for their third and fourth grade years. There were no major differences between boys and girls, or between students of different races, suggesting that this intervention works across demographic groups.