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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.

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Helping employees manage chronic disease like diabetes — improving personal health while reducing a business' overall health costs — is an important part of well-run workplace wellness programs.

A primary chronic disease that requires great focus and care: Diabetes. It's a area where nutrition and diet can play important roles.

Indeed, we have noted that Interactive Health has found that:

  • 30-39% of Americans are estimated to be living with prediabetes
  • An estimated 90% of those with prediabetes are not aware of their risk
  • Although more effective, only 25-35% of all those at risk of prediabetes are identified through our targeted A1c testing

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention outlines various keys to build a workplace wellness program that focuses on diabetes. Moreover, the CDC offers a wide range of important information about diabetes and the workplace in its Workplace Health Resource Center.

Now a new study focuses on Type 1 Diabetes and finds, according to MedPage Today, that “among people with type 1 diabetes, following a very low-carbohydrate diet (VLCD) can aid in achieving glycemic control.”

The study, published in Pediatrics, is titled “Management of Type 1 Diabetes With a Very Low–Carbohydrate Diet.” MedPage notes that the study “included 316 responses from both adults with type 1 diabetes and the parents of children with type 1 diabetes.”

The authors outline the challenge: “Despite major medical and technological advances, the management of T1DM remains suboptimal. With an average overall hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) of 8.2%, only 20% of children and 30% of adults achieve the glycemic targets of HbA1c <7% for adults and <7.5% for children as set forth by the ADA to reduce long-term complications. The greatest challenge in this regard involves difficulty controlling postprandial glycemia, which is a major determinant of HbA1c. Even with modern insulin analogs and technical advances, a mismatch between carbohydrate absorption and insulin action typically exists after meals. Beyond a point, measures to lower postprandial hyperglycemia inevitably increase risk for hypoglycemia, with potentially life-threatening consequences.”

They conclude: “We observed measures of glycemic control in the near-normal range, low rates of hypoglycemia and other adverse events, and generally high levels of satisfaction with health and diabetes control. These findings are without precedent among people with T1DM, revealing a novel approach to the prevention of long-term diabetes complications.”

And how did a very low carbohydrate diet (VLCD) work?

The authors state: “We suggest that a VLCD may allow for exceptional control of T1DM without increased risk of adverse events. This possibility is mechanistically plausible because of the dominant effects of dietary carbohydrates on postprandial glycemia and the lower insulin doses required with a VLCD. The results, if confirmed in clinical trials, indicate that the chronic complications of T1DM might be prevented by diet. In light of study limitations, these findings by themselves should not be interpreted as sufficient to justify a change in diabetes management.”

 

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