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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.

Last week we reported important news for improved nutrition in the U.S. — the implementation of new menu labeling standards.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration writes: “May 7, 2018 is the compliance date for the menu labeling final rule. On this date, consumers will have access to calorie and nutrition information in certain chain establishments covered by the rule. The menu labeling requirements apply to restaurants and similar retail food establishments that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations. In addition, they must be doing business under the same name and offering for sale substantially the same menu items.”

Needless to say, the news creates a new opportunity for well-run workplace wellness programs to help educate and engage employees around healthy eating.

Said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D: “We’re encouraged that so many consumers will benefit from the uniform calorie information on menus covered by the new law. We’ll continue to work with industry stakeholders to support their implementation. But it’s also important to note that the implementation of menu labeling is one part of a comprehensive tool box — that includes changes to the Nutrition Facts label and modernization of labeling claims — to help consumers make healthier choices for themselves and their families.”

But what does the research say?

As part of the FDA Commissioner's statement, he notes a recent RAND Corporation study titled “Examining Consumer Responses to Calorie Information on Restaurant Menus in a Discrete Choice Experiment.”

The 2018 Rand 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.”

It examined two areas:

  1. “Consumer Choice Experiment: The online consumer choice experiment sought to estimate consumer responses to labels that satisfy the FDA labeling rule for calorie information by testing whether consumers order fewer calories if they see a menu that provides calorie information and whether their choices can be associated with individual characteristics, including sociodemographics.”
  2. “Evaluation of Menu Changes over Time: The second objective of this study was to evaluate restaurant menu changes over time and by type of restaurant.”

As the study notes: “Providing calorie information on menus could allow consumers to better assess the nutritional value of restaurant foods and thereby improve their decisionmaking.”

Tomorrow, we examine the study results.

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