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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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crowdedmarathon1-620x465How much can others influence our desire to stay fit? According to a new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the answer is a lot.

The new research found that “if one spouse improves his or her exercise regimen, the other spouse is significantly more likely to follow suit.”

Said Laura Cobb, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health doctoral student and co-author of the research: “When it comes to physical fitness, the best peer pressure to get moving could be coming from the person who sits across from you at the breakfast table. There's an epidemic of people in this country who don't get enough exercise and we should harness the power of the couple to ensure people are getting a healthy amount of physical activity.”

According to the Baltimore Sun: “Cobb and her colleagues analyzed data from an Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, which followed adults ages 45 to 65 years old in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During the study, researchers asked more than 3,200 couples about their physical activity levels at two medical visits held about six years apart.”

“Using data from the ARIC study, Cobb and her colleagues found when a wife met the recommended exercise levels during both medical visits, her husband — who did not meet the recommended levels during his first visit — was 70 percent more likely than a husband with a less physically active wife to meet those levels by the follow-up visit.”

Of course, this is not the first study to review the connection between close relationships and fitness. The New York Times writes: “The results of past studies on this subject have been alternately predictable and startling. Single men and women, for instance, generally exercise far more than do married people, although divorce can change that. Men typically exercise more after a marriage ends; women in that situation frequently exercise less. Meanwhile, employed men, even those with desk jobs, usually exercise more than men who are unemployed.”

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