Some of you may have noticed that I can occasionally be cantankerous—I prefer to think of it as being charmingly eccentric—about certain topics. Whatever you call it, there’s no denying that I’m inclined to view any subject that could be described as “received wisdom” through nasty, suspicious eyes.
It all began with chocolate. When I was a child, I was told not to eat chocolate because it caused cavities. When I was a teenager, they told me it caused pimples. As a young adult, they said it was full of fat and would cause heart problems. All those claims turned out to be false and now they’re telling me that all that sugar will cause my liver to fail. That claim will probably turn out to be false too.
If you were lucky enough not to have suffered from the chocolate myths, here’s another: the food pyramid. For my entire life and almost certainly yours, the food pyramid was received wisdom and everyone was encouraged to eat what turns out to be an unhealthy diet. Fifty years of bad diet because, you know, the food pyramid. It was received wisdom so it must have been true.
That brings us to today’s topic: standing desks. I don’t use one and I’ve never thought much about them but every time I saw something about standing desks and their putative benefits I got that little tingling that is my received wisdom alarm. Now from Science Alert we have this article claiming that standing desks may be less healthy than sitting. When you do actual studies, you find that
- Standing desks are no better for cardiovascular health than sitting
- Standing desk may actually be more harmful than sitting
Like all such examples, this conventional wisdom make sense. It seems like it should be true. Only like chocolate and the food pyramid it probably isn’t.
So what’s the takeaway? View all instances of received wisdom through skeptical eyes. Then maybe you can be a curmudgeon too.