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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

A central goal for well-run workplace wellness programs is to help members manage chronic disease — it not only improves personal health, but also helps businesses manage overall health costs.

And a key aspect of managing chronic disease, of course, is managing obesity.

We recently reported on a new JAMA study is titled “Differences in Obesity Prevalence by Demographic Characteristics and Urbanization Level Among Adults in the United States, 2013-2016. ”The study asks a simple question: ” During 2013-2016, were there differences in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity by demographics and urbanization level among US adults?”

The authors write: “Differences in obesity by sex, age group, race and Hispanic origin among US adults have been reported, but differences by urbanization level have been less studied. To provide estimates of obesity by demographic characteristics and urbanization level and to examine trends in obesity prevalence by urbanization level.”

We also reported that the U.S. Preventative Service Task Force has issued a Draft Recommendation Statement on the role of behavioral interventions titled “Weight Loss to Prevent Obesity-Related Morbidity and Mortality in Adults: Behavioral Interventions.”

The Task Force exists because, as the group states, “Since 1998, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has been authorized by the U.S. Congress to convene the Task Force and to provide ongoing scientific, administrative, and dissemination support to the Task Force.”

The report concludes: “The USPSTF concludes with moderate certainty that offering or referring adults with obesity to intensive, multicomponent behavioral interventions (i.e., behavior-based weight loss and weight loss maintenance interventions) has a moderate net benefit.”

Now MedPage Today asks: “Is it possible to be fat and fit?”

MedPage reports that Prakash Deedwania, MD, of the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine says: “Obesity is never healthy; it's just a question of time. You can be fat and fit, and you will probably be okay for a little while. But to remain fat and fit is difficult. Most obese people will convert to a metabolically unhealthy state.”

The post continues: “Nearly 38% of U.S. adults are obese and another 33% are overweight. And about 35% of American adults — including nearly 50% of those age 60 years or older — are estimated to have metabolic syndrome.”

“Metabolic syndrome is worse than obesity,” MedPage quotes Carl Lavie, MD, of the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans. “Although abdominal obesity is one of the components of metabolic syndrome, some people without abdominal obesity have metabolic syndrome and some obese people do not.”

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