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Are We Wrong to Eat at Our Desks?

General information April 23rd 2013

In previous blogs I have talked about the eating at your desks and have outlined the advantages and disadvantages to this. It seems that the debate still continues as to whether the act of eating at your desk during your lunch hour is disgusting or not.

Having a look over the past couple of decades we can see that not only have we seen an increase in the amount of numbers of office workers, we have also seen an increase in the amount of time that these workers actually spend working. Pressure has continued to grow over the years causing office workers to spend longer planted on their office chair at their desk. So much so that a large proportion of these, choose to eat their lunch at their desk so they can get on with work. In fact studies show that this is not a small proportion, but in fact 54%.

So what’s the problem you may ask? Well some researchers have suggested that by eating at your desk, you could be inflating your risk of illnesses such as obesity, DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) and even stress. OK you may be thinking how can this be related to stress? And to be honest so am I, but it seems the negative list continues.

Tests into how hygienic office workers desks actually are have been undertaken with staggering results. The study measured the ATP levels in and around the office with under 100 being relatively clean with over 300 being “a high risk for illness. 27% of computer keyboards that were tested in the office had a level of 300 or higher, a far greater number than originally thought.

So where does this leave us now? Looking at the results we can see that there may be cause for concern, but it appears that studies are always being undertaken that give us bad news, for example apparently “canned soup can increase our risk of developing cancer by up to 25%” and if we listened to every single warning that was put in front of our faces we as a planet would not be able to function. I will leave it up to you to make your own judgements as to whether this could be a serious factor in our overall health and well being.

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