Example A: The Fitbro
Businesswoman Nilofer Merchant wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review Blog, which has gone on to become one of the most read posts on the HBR site this year, in which she parrots the convention that sitting too much is killing us, going so far as to equate sitting with smoking. Runner’s World has inexplicably also trod this path, which will not lead us to the land of data, logic, or even common sense.
Capricious furniture vendors, imitating their wellness brethren, have grabbed the theme even though it is demonstrably untrue. Take, for example, Varidesk, which uses this YouTube video to sells its signature product, a desk that adjusts vertically. The theoretical claim, supported by nary a data point, is that workers should stand rather than sit.
On their website, the Varidesk folks also make this claim: “The VARIDESK was developed to address the negative side-effects of being seated for the majority of the working day.”Continue reading…