Yet another paper has been published on the waste of time, money and morale that results from the recent infatuation with wellness programs.
This is from Alfred Lewis, JD; Vikram Khanna, MHS; and Shana Montrose, MPH writing at the American Journal of Managed Care:
American corporations continue to expand wellness programs, which now reach an estimated 90% of workers in large organizations, yet no study has demonstrated that the main focus of these programs—weight control—has any positive effect. There is no published evidence that large-scale corporate attempts to control employee body weight through financial incentives and penalties have generated savings from long-term weight loss, or a reduction in inpatient admissions associated with obesity or even long-term weight loss itself. Other evidence contradicts the hypothesis that population obesity rates meaningfully retard economic growth or manufacturing productivity. Quite the contrary, overscreening and crash dieting can impact employee morale and even harm employee health. Therefore, the authors believe that corporations should disband or significantly reconfigure weight-oriented wellness programs, and that the Affordable Care Act should be amended to require such programs to conform to accepted guidelines for harm avoidance. ...
Corporate weight control programs are ineffective at reducing weight; in addition, the nexus between weight loss and savings/productivity improvement is weak. Especially given the costs and potential harms of these programs, the authors recommend phasing them out altogether and reallocating resources towards creating a healthier work environment for everyone.Full paper linked here.
Losing weight is hard. Keeping it off for the long term is nearly impossible. It is beyond short-sighted to think that one's employer can have an impact on the endeavor. Furthermore, so much of the "accepted" lore in wellness programs is tied to the USDA's outdated and increasingly reversed food pyramid. For 40 years we were told eggs were bad for us. Now they are not. We were told to cut out fat and eat processed carbohydrates and margarine. We now know those are the worst things for us. Employers should remain focused on their expertise. If you want to improve an employee's well being, bonuses, time off, and other rewards to improve work-life balance work much better than trying to foster weight loss.
If you need more convincing enjoy this Ted Talk from Sandra Aamodt - Why Dieting Doesn't Usually Work:
In the US, 80% of girls have been on a diet by the time they're 10 years old. In this honest, raw talk, neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt uses her personal story to frame an important lesson about how our brains manage our bodies, as she explores the science behind why dieting not only doesn't work, but is likely to do more harm than good. She suggests ideas for how to live a less diet-obsessed life, intuitively.
It’s an age-old story. A person has a huge amount of weight to lose and gets rid of most of it through a combination of diet, exercise, and lifestyle modification. And they feel fantastic. They’ve got energy for days, their skin glows, they exude newfound confidence, and they experience other small miracles. Many of you have lived this. But then something happens: the weight loss stops, or, worse, it reverses. They can keep the weight at bay as long as their diet is ironclad and they don’t skip any workouts, but as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they gain weight. And when they gain, they seem to gain it faster and more easily than should be normal. It just doesn’t seem fair.
What’s going on here?
It comes down to how we gain and lose weight.
See, there are two kinds of fat gain: hypertrophic and hyperplastic. Adipose tissue hypertrophy is when your existing fat cells get bigger. Adipose tissue hyperplasia is when entirely new fat cells are created.
The vast majority of fat cells are created and established during childhood and adolescence. During early infancy and from ages 9 to 13 appear to be especially crucial stages for adipose hyperplasia (PDF). After adolescence, you’re pretty much stuck with the number of fat cells your body has made. There are some regional differences in how adults gain body fat, with overfeeding creating new fat cells in the lower body fat but not upper body fat, but for the most part, the number of fat cells a person has is fixed during adolescence and only increases in adults with obesity. If your existing fat cells are filled to the brim and there’s nowhere else to put the incoming energy, the body will make new ones.
In fact, adult adipose hyperplasia is a safety feature. As much as we hate the idea of adding entirely new fat cells to our body, they’re storage depots for excess energy. If you don’t have the extra fat cells for spillover, you’ll start depositing fat in the liver and around the other organs — basically, anyplace that’ll take it. This can have disastrous effects on our health. Animal studies show that inducing adipose tissue hyperplasia in energy excess alleviates the symptoms of type 2 diabetes in obese mice, while hypertrophic obesity (bigger fat cells) is associated with type 2 diabetes. In that respect, hyperplastia delays the development of fatty liver, diabetes, and other diseases of severely excessive nutrient accumulation by providing a place to put the nutrients.
Weight loss doesn’t remove these fat cells, though. It pulls fat from existing ones, leaving the (mostly) empty cells behind. A formerly obese person who’s dieted and exercised down to 15% body fat still has the same number of fat cells he did when he was at 35% body fat. The fat is just spread more thinly, which makes avoiding weight regain more difficult. Why?
It has to do with leptin. ...See full column here.
For more on how our food pyramid should look, try this one:
