Research has shown that sedentary behavior obviously plays a part in increasing risk for chronic and fatal illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, obesity and diabetes. But a new study has suggested that the standing approach to office life might not be as helpful as it has been claimed in previous studies. Many companies have also offered standing / sitting desks which can be used to work while standing.

The idea behind standing desks is interesting and might work. But, in reality, the standing desks don’t decrease the amount of sitting at offices in a way that may lead to a meaningful impact on health in the long run, the study team noticed.

Published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews on March 18, the report found that most of the studies about the advantages of standing desks have been poorly designed and a lot among them are based on sample sizes that are quite small to interpret meaningful results.

In the analysis, the researchers included 20 studies, with in total 2,180 participants, all of which belonged to high income countries. Among the analyzed studies, nine evaluated physical workplace alterations, two were dedicated to policy changes and the focus of seven studies was on information and counseling related to standing desks.

Two more studies examined the impact of both changes in physical workplace and information and counseling. There were also a few studies that looked at what impact treadmill desks and other innovative interventions have.

They discovered that standing desks, alone, cut the workplace sitting by nearly 30 to 120 minutes per day, no matter employees were aware of the benefits of moving out of their chairs or not.

The availability of standing desks at least cut the amount of time people spent sitting. But, it is not sure so far, whether it could have any long run health benefit, mainly in case it’s not performed consistently.