health promotion

Humans often insist on continuing unhealthy behaviors and/or avoiding preventative scans, tests, exercise and wellness even when faced with catastrophic results.  Examples of this include; ignoring a lump in the breast until it’s too late, continuing a diet of heavy fried foods after a diagnosis of diabetes, or continuing to smoke after a diagnosis of lung cancer.

According to an April 8th article published by Healthfinder.gov; many patients diagnosed with lung cancer continue to smoke after being diagnosed.

"The biggest obstacle is fatalism, the belief that it is too late to quit smoking so why bother," said Kathryn E. Weaver, study lead author and assistant professor of social sciences and health policy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C.

That fatalism can also be said of a morbidly obese employee who feels “set apart” from her peers by her weight, then goes home to a family who is also morbidly obese.  If someone is entirely entrenched in an unhealthy lifestyle with people who are in the same boat, it may seem impossible to even imagine the changes that could be made.

Learning how to change a family’s “wellness picture” can be a life-changing experience for an employee.  But it takes more than a workout routine and the latest fad diet.  A corporate wellness program is meant to talk to and facilitate all of your employees; the athlete, and the person who needs a special hand to guide them to goals they didn’t even know were possible.  You never know when someone is ready to listen.

“The health of an individual is almost inseparable from the health of a larger community, and the health of every community determines the health of a nation,” said Assistant Secretary for Health; Dr. Koh, M.D., M.P.H.

Preventable disease kills seven out of 10 Americans a year, and accounts for 75 percent of the money spent on healthcare.  We’ve talked about these preventable diseases many times before; Diabetes, Heart Disease and Cancer.  The bottom line in any wellness or health program is money.  Rather than throwing money at these diseases once they occur, it makes good monetary sense to attempt to prevent and avoid the disease in the first place.

Those expensive statistics are worrisome to you, the employer, and to me, the wellness professional.  But how do we make those statistics real to the obese civilian or employee who sees themselves as separate from their community just by virtue of being ostracized because of their weight? 

Penny Hoff, a health and fitness coach that contributes to the Huffington Post, presents it this way:

“Look around and you will see lots of obesity -- younger is the new fatter -- but what you will not see is lots of obese septuagenarians (70 years old) or octogenarians.”

“People who remain obese into their second half of life cut the length of that second half by more than half that of a normal weight person. The 70, 80 and 90 year old people you see living an active life are the lean ones. And it's not because the heavier old folks stayed home, or that they decided to lose weight in their fifth or sixth decade. It's because, as Hippocrates, The Dr. Oz of 460 BC said a few thousand years ago, ‘Fat men are more likely to die suddenly than the slender.’ If you are obese, you are going to live a shorter life. Raise your hand if you're ready to go even one day sooner than you have to.”

Sobering.  What’s required after the morbidity wake-up call are the health risk management and wellness programs needed to help our obese employees and their families dial back and reverse the probability of an early demise.  Programs offered by scientifically informed, compassionate professionals make reaching a healthy lifestyle a reality. That’s good for the Nation.  Offering corporate wellness to your employees is good for your wallet, and on a very human level, keeping families together longer is good for the soul.

The Southeastern United States can’t catch a break.  In the 1980’s, they became known as the “Stroke Belt”.  In maps generated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the “Stroke Belt” is made quite visible by a markedly higher stroke mortality rate than the rest of the country.

Now that area has the dubious distinction of also being dubbed the “Diabetes Belt” according to the CDC.  This broad sweep of geography now boasts an 11% diabetes rate, as compared to 8.5% for the rest of the country.

The reasons for the high stroke and diabetes rates seem fairly obvious; fried food and sedentary lifestyles are the norm in these regions.  One possible cause may not be so apparent, however.  Humans tend to look at their peers and consider the mean average or appearance of everyone around them to be acceptable.  If everyone in your town is heavy and eats lots of fried food, why not go with the flow? 

That shines the light on the importance of numbers and education.  Lives depend on it.  We have a prevalence of disordered eating in this country in all segments of society fed by unrealistic media expectations to be ultra thin.  But we may also have a large part of our population that does not realize they are morbidly obese. 

Access to correct and current information that is scientifically rooted is vital in all walks of life, in all social stratospheres.  People often base decisions and make lifestyle choices based on misinformation and myth.  Making the right or wrong choices can and will result in deadly consequences or a healthy and productive lifestyle.   Keep your employees and their families at their best with corporate wellness concepts that include a range of lifestyle applications such as programs offered by registered dieticians, group programs that track results, and accurate and informed onsite training.

Almost 60% of women ages 18-64 use the internet to look up health information.

How this female population uses the web to improve their health is unclear.  Additionally, the effectiveness of online behavior change programs in the workplace is still unproven.

What is clear, however, is that after visiting a health portal, these web surfers are very likely to embark on a program to exercise and lose weight. They prefer both online and offline information about wellness. They respond to incentives, especially cash in excess of $250 and reductions in health insurance premiums. They will use the web as a catalyst to schedule a preventative exam or reduce stress. The better educated they are, the more likely they are to track their progress via the web. And, as is the case with most critical changes in any behavior, spousal support goes a long way to ensure success.

The web is a great place to start, assess, and track healthy behaviors for college-educated women in the workplace. Keeping them motivated to sustain a healthy lifestyle takes offline support by a trusted partner, some cash, and the confidence in knowing that their information is secure.

Organizational culture can occur through default or design. When creating a culture of health and wellness in your company, striving for the best in design is the ultimate goal. David Hunnicut, President of The Wellness Councils of America, interviewed dozens of wellness experts and speakers at the 2010 American Journal of Health Promotion Conference and discovered that the path to perfection has four guidelines:

1. Establish a broad base of senior leadership support

2. Engineer a health promoting environment with obvious options to be active, eat well and minimize stress

3. Strive to change the influential policies

4. Tap into every communication channel at your disposal

An appropriate culture of health can make a world of difference in the performance of your human resources. Are you designing what you and your leaders want, or are you accepting just what you can get?

Let’s review.  What is health promotion and what does it mean to your human capital?   When you empower your team with the tools for a healthy life, you also facilitate their productivity at work and at home.

In my last blog I talked about how obesity starves your company’s bottom line.  But I also wonder how you take a population of people who are wired differently than normal weight people and convince them to make a change?  People like to make their own choices, even if they are bad ones. Obese Americans know that excess weight reduces their lifespan by about 2.5 years, yet obesity rates continue to rise.