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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.

New ammunition has arrived for well-run workplace wellness programs aiming to help employees address obesity and chronic diseases: An attack on trans fats.

Just under three years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans for a “ban of artificial trans fat, which are linked to heart disease, from the food supply” by 2018, as Time reported. As CNN reported at the time: “Eating a diet rich in trans fat is linked to higher body weight, heart disease and memory loss. It has been shown to raise the “bad,” or LDL, cholesterol in the blood, which can lead to cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.”

We noted a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that reports on results that already exist from New York. It'stitled “Hospital Admissions for Myocardial Infarction and Stroke Before and After the Trans-Fatty Acid Restrictions in New York.”

The findings: “There was an additional 6.2% decline in hospital admissions for myocardial infarction and stroke among populations living in counties with vs without trans-fatty acid restrictions. The decline in events reached statistical significance 3 or more years after restrictions were implemented.”

Now the World Health Organization has announced a plan to “eliminate industrially-produced trans-fatty acids from global food supply.”

WHO released REPLACE, a step-by-step guide for the elimination of industrially-produced trans-fatty acids from the global food supply.

The information can be useful for workplace wellness programs that seek new ways to inform and engage employees not only about trans fats dangers, but also ways to reduce them in one's diet.

The organization writes that: “Eliminating trans fats is key to protecting health and saving lives: WHO estimates that every year, trans fat intake leads to  more than 500,000 deaths of people from cardiovascular disease.”

“Industrially-produced trans fats are contained in hardened vegetable fats, such as margarine and ghee, and are often present in snack food, baked foods, and fried foods. Manufacturers  often use them as they have a longer shelf life than other fats. But healthier alternatives can be used that would not affect taste or cost of food.”

Tomorrow: The specifics behind REPLACE

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