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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.

Is there a connection between long work hours and diabetes in women?

Helping employees manage or prevent diabetes is an important function of well-run workplace wellness programs that seek to improve overall health and reduce health costs.

We have noted the positive effects of exercise on diabetes management. MedPage Today reported that “patients with type 2 diabetes who partook in 6 weeks of the high-intensity exercise program CrossFit reported weight loss, improved cardiovascular measures, and had significantly increased insulin sensitivity.”

This could provide workplace wellness programs new ways to engage employees in fitness, offering a new format and additional linkage between exercise and chronic disease management.

The study in Experimental Physiology is titled “Functional high intensity exercise training ameliorates insulin resistance and cardiometabolic risk factors in type 2 diabetes.”

Now a new study questions the negative role that excessive work hours may have on diabetes among women.

The study, published in BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, is titled “Adverse effect of long work hours on incident diabetes in 7065 Ontario workers followed for 12 years.”

The objective: “According to the International Diabetes Federation, the most important challenge for prevention is now to identify social and environmental modifiable risk factors of diabetes. In this regard, long work hours have recently been linked with diabetes, but more high-quality prospective studies are needed. We evaluated the relationship between long work hours and the incidence of diabetes among 7065 workers over a 12-year period in Ontario, Canada.”

The authors not that “long work hours did not increase the risk of developing diabetes among men.”

However, “among women, those usually working 45 hours or more per week had a significantly higher risk of diabetes than women working between 35 and 40 hours per week. The effect was slightly attenuated when adjusted for the potentially mediating factors which are smoking, leisure time physical activity, alcohol consumption and body mass index.”

The conclusion: “Working 45 hours or more per week was associated with an increased incidence of diabetes among women, but not men. Identifying modifiable risk factors such as long work hours is of major importance to improve prevention strategies and orient policy making.”

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