Workplace Wellness Lab logo

TITLE

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.

As Americans focus on heart health — and seek ways to take increased personal control over their heart health — two areas that continue to stand out are diet and exercise. And for good reason.

We noted the MedPage Today report that stated: “Metabolically healthy obese women — that is, those without diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol — had a nearly 40% increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease compared with metabolically healthy women of normal weight, said researchers led by Nathalie Eckel, MSc, of the German Center for Diabetes Research in Neuherberg.”

We also highlighted the role for exercise via a MedPage post notes that “Exercise May Outrun Strong Family Risk for Heart Disease; Cardio fitness associated with lower heart disease, AF risk.”

The post is based on a study published in Circulation titled “Associations of Fitness, Physical Activity, Strength, and Genetic Risk With Cardiovascular Disease: Longitudinal Analyses in the UK Biobank Study.”

The authors write: “Observational studies have shown inverse associations among fitness, physical activity, and cardiovascular disease. However, little is known about these associations in individuals with elevated genetic susceptibility for these diseases.”

Other studies show the benefits of a healthy diet.

For example, the Spanish Mediterranean diet was examined in and the New England Journal of Medicine. As MedPage states: “The Mediterranean diet supplemented with nuts reduced stroke by 46% over 5 years.”

In addition, “in the Seven Countries Study, the coronary risk on Crete was one-fifteenth what it was in Finland, where people eat more like North Americans, and only 40% of the risk in Japan, where only 10% of calories were from fat.”

Lastly, “a very important study conducted in Israel by Iris Shai, RD, PhD, and colleagues compared the Mediterranean diet against both a low-carb diet, similar to the Atkins Diet, and a low-fat diet. Weight loss was equal on the low-carb and Mediterranean diets, and both were significantly better than the low-fat diet. More importantly, the Mediterranean diet was clearly superior in reducing blood sugar, fasting insulin levels, and insulin resistance among diabetics. It is clearly the best diet for diabetes.”

For a well-run workplace wellness program, the opportunities exist to engage employees with health knowledge about diet, fitness, and their health.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This