Standing desks in classrooms could help children maintain a healthy body weight, a new study suggests.

These desks are set at a height that allows students to alternate between sitting on a stool or standing while working.

Standing desks “can interrupt sedentary behavior patterns” while kids are in school, “simply, at a low cost, and without disrupting classroom instruction time,” the authors of the study write in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers studied third- and fourth-graders in three Texas elementary schools and found that kids spent more time on their feet, and slimmed down, when the standing desks were used instead of traditional classroom desks.

The study started out with 24 teachers and 380 students. The teachers were randomly assigned to have standing desks in their classrooms, or regular desks.

Overall, compared to students who used regular desks for two years, students who had standing desks in their classrooms for two years in a row saw their BMI move 5 percentiles lower, on average.

Reducing sitting time among school-age students could decrease the inactivity linked to a range of health problems, including obesity and diabetes, Mark Benden and colleagues wrote in their report.

“If you look at the national trends, we’re more sedentary than ever before, and naturally that affects weight gain,” Benden told Reuters Health.

“With the focus on state testing and academics, we’ve lost the regular recess and physical education time in schools,” Benden said. Standing desks bring “a difference to the classroom that doesn’t take away from classroom time.”

Previous research has linked sedentary time to poor academic achievement and low self-esteem in children, the research team pointed out.

“We force kids to sit down, sit still and be quiet, and this is unnatural for young children,” Benden said. “If we want kids to sit less and move more, we should encourage activity in the learning process.” γ