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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!

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Yesterday we reported that while smoking rates have declined according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they remain higher outside of metropolitan regions.

Today we focus on non-urban obesity. And the news is not good.

This information can be highly useful for well-run workplace wellness programs, particularly those that serve businesses and members who may reside outside metropolitan locations.

A new JAMA study is titled “Differences in Obesity Prevalence by Demographic Characteristics and Urbanization Level Among Adults in the United States, 2013-2016.” The study asks a simple question: ” During 2013-2016, were there differences in the prevalence of obesity and severe obesity by demographics and urbanization level among US adults?”

The authors write: “Differences in obesity by sex, age group, race and Hispanic origin among US adults have been reported, but differences by urbanization level have been less studied. To provide estimates of obesity by demographic characteristics and urbanization level and to examine trends in obesity prevalence by urbanization level.”

The results? As MedPage Today reports: “Smalltown America Seeing More Severe Obesity: Report adds to sense of growing rural health crisis.” It states:

“During 2013-2016, 42.4% of men who resided in small to medium metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) — those with populations less than 1 million — had obesity compared to 31.8% of men living in large MSAs.”

“There were also similar patterns among women as well, marked by a significantly higher age-adjusted prevalence for obesity among those living in small or medium MSAs versus large MSAs.”

“However, women residing in non-MSAs — non-metropolitan areas — saw the highest numbers out of all the areas, with an obesity prevalence of 47.2%.”

“As for severe obesity, both men and women in non-MSAs saw significantly higher prevalence compared to those living in large metropolitan areas.”

Said the authors, according to MedPage: “Urban-rural health disparities also have been reported for various health conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, arthritis, mental health disorders, and prescription medication use. [C]ompared with adults living in urban areas, those living in rural areas have higher mortality from certain chronic diseases, suicide, and all causes. Life expectancy in rural areas in 2005-2009 was 2 years shorter than in metropolitan areas.”

As the study concludes: ” In this nationally representative survey of adults in the United States, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity and severe obesity in 2013-2016 varied by level of urbanization, with significantly greater prevalence of obesity and severe obesity among adults living in nonmetropolitan statistical areas compared with adults living in large metropolitan statistical areas.”

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