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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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For the last two days, we've explored how to reduce sugar, how rampant it is in our foods — and how a well-run workplace wellness program can help employees on this health-improving track.

For example, we noted that the University of California, San Francisco found that “Added sugar is hiding in 74% of packaged foods.”

The SugarScience site states: “We tend to think that added sugar is mainly found in desserts like cookies and cakes, but it's also found in many savory foods, such as bread and pasta sauce. And some foods promoted as ‘natural' or ‘healthy' are laden with added sugars, compounding the confusion. In fact, manufacturers add sugar to 74% of packaged foods sold in supermarkets. So, even if you skip dessert, you may still be consuming more added sugar than is recommended.”

A well-run workplace wellness program can go a long way towards helping employees with this challenge. With eduction, information, engagement and more, employees can learn more about where sugar can be found and what alternatives might be good to eat.

But now the New York Times offers additional help. As writer David Leonhardt states: “Virtually the only way to eat a healthy amount of sugar is to make a conscious effort. You can think of it as a political act: resisting the sugar industry’s attempts to profit off your body. Or you can simply think of it as taking care of yourself.”

To put his thoughts into action, Leonhardt has created an online tool “How to Stop Eating Sugar.” It begins:

“If you’re like most Americans, you eat more sugar than is good for you. But it’s entirely possible to eat less sugar without sacrificing much — if any — of the pleasures of eating. Surprising as it may sound, many people who have cut back on sugar say they find their new eating habits more pleasurable than their old ones. This guide will walk you through why sugar matters, how you can make smart food choices to reduce sugar consumption, and how you can keep your life sweet, even without so many sweets.”

The guide outlines the various areas where sugar can be cut from one's diet:

  • “The Added Sugar Problem: Here's why you eat more sugar than you realize, and why it's a problem.”
  • “During Breakfast: Remember, breakfast shouldn't taste like dessert.”
  • “From the Bottle: Beverages are one of the biggest sources of added sugars in our diets.”
  • “In the Pantry: Check the labels of your pantry staples for some easy places to cut the sugar.”
  • “The Sauce Risk: What's hiding in your ketchup? Sugar, most likely.”
  • “At Dessert: Dessert doesn't have to be any less sweet if you are cutting back on sugar.” 
For additional inspiration, the author's bio at the end of the piece states that he “eats more sweets than he should but fewer than he once did.” Sounds like a good start for a well-run workplace wellness program.

 

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