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No free lunch, but healthy diet improves productivity
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-01 16:31
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 percent of total health costs in
industrialised countries, Wanjek reported in "Food at Work," a review
commissioned by the United Nations' International Labor Office.
Fat workers are twice as likely as fit workers to miss work. In the United
States, the total cost attributable to obesity was $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 in a Reuters interview.
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 $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.
BOOSTING MORALE
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.
"It really is in the company's best interests to do it, in addition to
boosting morale," Grossman said by telephone.
Not every company can afford to do what Dole did, but U.S. 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.
"Location is everything," said Dr. Preston Maring, a physician who came up
with the farm market plan. "If we put markets in the pathway that people
normally walk, it's very hard to pass up a fresh peach in the middle of August."
Farm markets are a safe bet at Kaiser's northern California base, where local
produce is easily available year-round, but Maring noted that the programme has
expanded to 24 locations around the United States. The company pays only for
whatever government permits are required, he said.
There are innovative projects elsewhere, Wanjek reported:
-- Healthy workplace canteens like the one at Husky Injection Molding Systems
Ltd in Ontario, Canada, where red meat and deep-fried items are banned and three
helpings of vegetables come with every meal;
-- Training for street-food vendors in hygiene and food safety in South
Africa, Tanzania and India;
-- Subsidised meal vouchers for use at restaurants and food shops in Brazil,
Hungary, Romania, France, Britain, Sweden, India, Lebanon and China.
VICIOUS CYCLE
The United Nations has been interested in worker nutrition for decades, but
until now it focused on poor countries where the issue was getting enough food
and clean water to employees, rather than heading off obesity.
"The whole issue of obesity, how it affected workers' health and productivity
and how the workplace could become one of the ways of reaching people to combat
obesity, had not been explored," the Geneva-based labour organization's William
Salter said in answer to e-mailed questions.
Wanjek, himself a rail-thin 6-footer who makes a pot of soup each week and
packages it to eat at work, described a vicious cycle based on poor nutrition in
the workplace:
Poor nutrition leads to poor health, bringing on a lack of energy, strength
and coordination and a lower learning potential, making for a poorly qualified
job pool with lower productivity, resulting in a loss of competitiveness, higher
business costs and lower investment and economic growth. In the end this brings
about lower wages and then, again, poor nutrition for workers, Wanjek wrote.
At a recent Washington restaurant lunch, Wanjek had turtle soup with sherry,
crispy fried fish and coleslaw and a few bites of sorbet for dessert.
Asked what place this kind of rich meal has in his examination of food at
work, he demurred: "I have nothing to say about these expense-account lunches
except that they eventually do you in, I'm sure."
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