May 27, 2020 — It seemed like a good idea at the time. Build incentives for employees for wellness into health benefit packages. Employees “volunteer” to give up some health privacy in order to have their employers collect health data on them. They get a little financial incentive to participate and then more incentive if their health data improves. […]
November 1, 2019 — Objectivity is having a rough time these days. This is true whether the subject is politics, policy, or even a study in a medical journal. Very often, believing is seeing. Not the other way around. A new study on soda policy in JAMA Internal Medicine provides a case in point. Improving Metabolic Profile Very Effortlessly […]
August 1, 2019 — How much are physical activity guidelines helping? If you judge by recent trends in NHANES data, not too much. In addition, two recent papers give us reason to think this shouldn’t be surprising. That’s because fitting physical activity into lives already consumed with work can be quite a challenge. So patterns of work, leisure, and […]
April 18, 2019 — The data are stubbornly refusing to cooperate with the wizards of workplace wellness. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds no effect on health or economic outcomes. Professor Eric Topol aptly sums it up in a tweet: The folly of “workplace wellness” programs: no clinical outcome improvements despite billions of […]
June 13, 2018 — It turns out that advertising for Philadelphia Cream Cheese captures a slice of reality – chow time at work. In a new study presented at Nutrition 2018, CDC researchers found that many workers routinely get a big chunk of empty calories from office food. In fact, 22% of workers get nearly 1,300 calories from workplace […]
January 23, 2018 — NBC canceled The Biggest Loser for good reasons, but Schlumberger doesn’t seem to care. Yesterday, this oil industry employer kicked off a $10,000 workplace weight loss contest. They might be telling themselves they’re promoting employee wellness. But they would be wrong. At Best Counterproductive, Dangerous for Some The Biggest Loser was a controversial spectacle from the very […]
