Report: Healthy Eating Improves Productivity
UNITED NATIONS: That fast-food burger, monster takeaway sandwich or bag of nutritional nothing you got from the vending machine at work does more than make you sluggish after lunch.
It’s probably making your company less productive.
The global cost amounts to billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, considering that a diet loaded with fat and sugar puts workers at risk for diabetes and obesity-related illnesses, said Christopher Wanjek, who wrote the book on food in the workplace.
Obesity accounts for as much as 7 per cent of total health costs in industrialized countries, Wanjek reported in “Food at Work,” a review commissioned by the United Nations’ International Labour Office.
Fat workers are twice as likely as fit workers to miss work. In the United States, the total cost attributable to obesity was US$99.2 billion in 1995, Wanjek wrote.
“We’re not talking about polio. We’re not talking about smallpox. Those diseases were hard to eradicate,” Wanjek said.
“We’re talking about nutritional diseases. This should be a no- brainer. Provide access to better food, and the disease will go away.”
There are solutions, but most require imagination and a bit of investment, Wanjek said.
One high-end example is Dole Food Co., which subsidised a healthy dining room for workers at its headquarters in Westlake Village, California, starting with an unlimited salad bar for US$1.50, free fruit snacks in the morning, free vegetable snacks in the afternoon and encouragement to go to the gym and exercise, alongside the company’s chief.
After six months, tests on 60 volunteers found lower cholesterol, lower levels of certain proteins that are predictors of future heart disease, lower triglycerides and glucose levels, said Jennifer Grossman, director of the Dole Nutrition Institute.
Not every company can afford to do what Dole did, but US health care giant Kaiser Permanente figured employees might eat more healthily if local farmers set up stalls on the company’s grounds. They turned out to be right.