By Jacob Goldstein We are built to walk, says James Levine, and
we sit at our peril. Levine is a professor of medicine at the
Mayo Clinic, and he envisions a white-collar world where
treadmill-ready stand-up desks are as common as cubicles. He’s
got a paper in the current issue of British Journal of Sports
Medicine suggesting that if obese office workers spent a few
hours a day walking while working, they could lose more than 40
pounds in a year. The Health Blog got Levine on the phone
yesterday to talk about his grand plan. He said he was walking
at his desk at the time, of course, though we couldn’t hear much
treadmill noise in the background. He’s pictured at left,
wearing a lightweight suit he designed for white-collar walking.
Here are a few highlights from our conversation. Q: What’s the
problem with desk jobs? A: Humans evolved over a million years
to walk. We are a bipedal, in-motion species. This is how we
explore. This is how we learn. This is how we work. This is how
we nourish. It’s all on foot–it