4.7 The office as a source of health: reading & references

Course subject(s) Module 4. Everyday environments

On the influence of the office environment on your health see:

  • Tabak RGHipp JAMarx CMBrownson RC. Workplace social and organizational environments and healthy-weight behaviors PLoS One. 2015 Apr 28;10(4):e0125424.

Recently there is a lot of attention to the health risk of prolonged sitting. One of the classic studies on this – in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet of  1953 – is on London bus drivers. One of the drivers sits behind the wheel all day, the other walks up and down the bus checking tickets. The first has much more heart disease than the latter.

  • Morris JN, Heady JA, Raffle PA, Roberts CG, Parks JW (1953). “Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”. Lancet 265(6795): 1053–7.

There are now many epidemiologic studies on the health risk of sitting:

  • Katzmarzyk PT et al. Sitting time and mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 2009; 41:998-1005.
  • Proper KI et al. Sedentary behaviors and Health outcomes among adults: A Systematic review of prospective studies. Am J. Prev Med 2011; 40:174-82.
  • van der Ploeg HP et al. Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in 222,497 Australian Adults. Arch Int Med 2012;172:494-500.

These recent studies have not found their way in guidelines yet, but in the UK an expert group formulated the advice to stand for two hours a working day and gradually increase to four hours.

  • John P Buckley, Alan Hedge, Thomas Yates, Robert J Copeland, Michael Loosemore, Mark Hamer, Gavin Bradley, David W Dunstan, The sedentary office: a growing case for change towards better health and productivity. Expert statement commissioned by Public Health England and the Active Working Community Interest Company. British journal of sports medicine. Juli 2015 Online first at: http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2015/04/23/bjsports-2015-094618

That standup meetings are not only healthier but also more efficient can be read here:

  • Bluedorn, Allen C.; Turban, Daniel B.; Love, Mary Sue. The effects of stand-up and sit-down meeting formats on meeting outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 84(2), Apr 1999, 277-285.
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Healthy ageing in 6 steps - Let the environment do the work by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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