TITLE

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.


NNM_Logo_2015_hires_lg_r1In our continuing support of National Nutrition Month, we turn from the body to mind.

The Huffington Post ran a compelling piece: “Diet May Be As Important To Mental Health As It Is To Physical Health.” The article looks at the recent U.S. Dietary Guidelines released by the U.S. Home of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

The piece states: “For the first time, a report by a task force advising on new dietary guidelines, commissioned by the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture, included a point considering the possible role of diet in mental health outcomes. The USDA and HHS report notes, for example, that the American Psychiatric Association classifies omega-3 fatty acids (which are most commonly found in oily fish) as a complementary treatment for depression. However, the advisory panel concluded, for now, that the research was too limited to make policy suggestions.”

One area of focus for nutrition and the brain has to do with the nutrients we eat. The piece cites research by Dr. Drew Ramsey, an integrative psychiatrist at Columbia University: “Ramsey and colleagues' paper cites a number of studies attesting to the vital role of certain nutrients in brain health, including omega-3s, Vitamin D, B vitamins, zinc, iron and magnesium. The modern diet, while dense in calories, tends to be lacking in these important nutrients, which may be contributing to the rise in mental health conditions. Many studies have linked depression with low levels of key B vitamins, for instance, while low maternal Vitamin D levels have been found to play a role in the child's risk of developing schizophrenia.”

Said Ramsey: “Food should be the first line of defense because it's a foundational treatment. We really need to move away from thinking of things like diet and exercise as ‘complementary' or ‘alternative.' That's really bad thinking that's gotten psychiatry into trouble.”

 

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This