Several years ago The Economist’s offices were refitted with standing desks. An electric motor and a pair of buttons meant you could easily adjust the desk’s height. The lazy and slothful could sit down as usual. The dedicated and virtuous could raise the desk’s height and work standing up.

That, at least, was the idea. But as a science-fiction author once remarked, the street finds its own use for things. Looking around the office, quite a few journalists have set the desks to the perfect height for resting one’s legs on, allowing them to recline even further back in their chairs. It is as close to lying down as you can get in an office.

Still, the idea was a good one. Prolonged sitting, as we note in this week’s column, is not very good for you. You can overstate the damage it does: comparisons with smoking, which some particularly zealous health scolds like to make, are fatuous. But you can certainly overstate the benefits of standing: it turns out to make essentially no difference to one’s calorie consumption, and can even have downsides.

You’ll have to read the column to get all the details. But as we note, there is now a new sort of technology available to health-conscious office drones. “Active seats” constantly shift themselves underneath their occupant’s backsides, turning the act of sitting down into a balancing act—and thus forcing them to constantly shift and move to compensate. It sounds like hell. Please don’t tell my boss about them.

Do you typically prefer to stand or sit at your desk? Tell us via our poll. And if you have an unusual set-up, tell us about it by dropping me a message at wellinformed@economist.com. We might feature you in next week’s newsletter.

Last week we asked if you try to “optimise” your gut microbiome—and we were inundated with responses. Some 39% of you say you eat fermented food, while 24% try to fortify your gut bacteria in other ways. Others were less convinced: well over a third (37%) said they didn’t have a special method for supporting their gut microbiome.

Anil says he has about four to five spoonfuls of Greek yogurt every day after lunch and “it does wonders”. Ty, writing from Louisiana, recommends a near-daily serving of a “micro green salad with multiple recently sprouted greens, seasonal veggies, nuts, fermented garlic and olives”.

Ann, however, is a sceptic and won’t invest her time in microbiome optimisation. She complains that there is too much health advice and “too many passing fancies” that she can’t keep up with it all. Gerardo rejects fermented foods, but for a different reason: “I do not like the taste.” See you next week.

Prolonged sitting rightly has a bad rap. A review in 2012 concluded that the most sedentary were more than twice as likely as the least to have or develop diabetes, and also faced a much higher risk of premature death. Another, in 2015, found that sitting for long stretches was associated with “deleterious health outcomes regardless of physical activity”. Three years after that an analysis of news articles in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found hundreds of pieces that referred to claims likening sitting to smoking.