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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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In our continuing coverage of the new U.S. Food & Drug Administration implementation of menu labeling standards, we look further at research results that continue to support the benefits of increased information around the food we eat.

As background: Well-run workplace programs that make healthy eating part of their overall approach may have a fresh opportunity to engage and educate members by utilizing news of — and facts from — the new standards and accompanying research. 

The FDA cites the 2018 RAND Corporation study titled “Examining Consumer Responses to Calorie Information on Restaurant Menus in a Discrete Choice Experiment.” The study “looked at how the provision of calorie information on restaurant menus affects consumers. To gain insight on the consumer perspective, we designed an online experiment in which participants chose items from the menus of nine different restaurant settings, ranging from fast-food outlets to movie theaters. The calorie labels on those menus followed the requirements described in the FDA rule, and the survey also collected data on sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes toward food, and use of nutrition and calorie labels.”

In a range of areas, the results show positive effects, including in:

  • “Overall effect of providing calorie information.”
  • “Effect of labeling on calorie choice by restaurant type.”
  • “Variation in consumer responses.”
  • “Characteristics predicting response to calorie information.”

The research also examined “Evaluation of Menu Changes over Time.” Here researchers sought “to evaluate restaurant menu changes over time and by type of restaurant. Previous studies have suggested that large chain restaurants reduced the number of calories in newly introduced menu items between 2012 and 2014. We analyzed data collected by MenuStat supplemented with 2010 data collected by RAND. With menu-item information from 164 restaurants, we examined how menus of major chain restaurants have changed from 2010 to 2015.”

Unfortunately, researchers “found no statistically significant evidence of a change in calories per menu item between 2010 and 2015… across ten categories of food items, the calorie amounts per item category were not substantially different in 2015 than they were in 2010.”

However, “We did find an important trend: Restaurants increasingly offer customizable items (in which the customer chooses a protein and one or two sides and/or condiments).”

This trend presents a challenge — but also an opportunity for well-run workplace wellness programs:

  • The challenge: “The presentation and usability of nutrition information also becomes more complex with customizable items. Labeling calorie content by menu item components makes information less user friendly, but if only calorie ranges were provided it could obscure the total calories of a given dish choice.”
  • The opportunity: “Future consumer education efforts may need to focus on raising awareness of this customization trend to improve customers’ understanding of how to use calorie information displays across restaurants.”

 

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