Studies Connect Workplace Eating to Employee Health
Looking for simple ways to pamper your staff during the holiday rush? Setting out a tray of Christmas cookies may do more harm than good.
According to several new reports, work environments can significantly affect how employees eat — and how much their waistlines increase. In fact, 75 percent of workers admit to "unhealthy snacking at least once a week at work, and 27 percent do so three or more times a week," according to a 2007 phone survey for Nationwide Better Health, as reported by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in Alexandria, Va.
Unhealthy eating habits on the job can be detrimental to overall worker health, Youfa Wang, M.D., said to SHRM. Wang was the lead author of a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study that found that 66 percent of U.S. adults were obese in 2003-2004.
"Obesity is a public health crisis," Wang said. "If the rate of obesity and overweight continues at this pace, by 2015, 75 percent of adults and nearly 24 percent of U.S. children and adolescents will be overweight or obese."
The picture isn't entirely bleak: By modeling and encouraging healthy lifestyles, employers can play a key role in decreasing the country's obesity rate — and, at the same time, improving workers' health and job satisfaction, said Neil Gordon, M.D., Nationwide's chief medical and science officer. And, that's good news for everyone, especially employers: Healthy employees are less likely to miss work for health-related reasons.
"Companies can provide resources that encourage their employees to eat well, stay active and, in short, live the best life possible," Gordon said. "These resources could not only help reduce health care spending for both employees and employers, but they could also help improve productivity."
What do you think? Can small-business owners really make a difference in how employees eat and exercise? Or, is that a task for big business only? Have you encouraged your employees to get healthy? E-mail your story to ebrief@safnow.org.
--Mary Westbrook
mwestbrook@safnow.org
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