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Es malo estar sentado mucho tiempo?

New research shows there’s a big difference between exercising too little and sitting too much. That’s because a standing body uses energy altogether differently from a sedentary body—and also from an exercising one. We burn calories at a different rate, store them in different ways, and our brains function differently, too. While data is still emerging, one experiment with high school kids found that standing in class instead of sitting improved their test scores by 20%.

All of which has doctors and health experts calling for a paradigm shift. “In the same way that standing up is an oddity now, sitting down should be,” says Dr. James Levine, director of the Mayo Clinic-Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative and probably best known as the inventor of the first treadmill desk. “My argument is that whatever building it is—a movie theater, airport, arts complex—a fundamental part of our thinking has become that people who enter that space will need to be seated.” And that’s what got us into all this trouble in the first place.