Whether wellness programs actually work—either by significantly improving health outcomes or by reducing healthcare costs—has become a subject of surprisingly fierce and unresolved debate.
Employers spend $742 per employee for wellness program incentives.
Employees find the financial incentives of the wellness programs appealing, yet only 24% of employees are willing to give up one to three hours of their time per week to exercise, attend wellness coaching sessions or research healthier recipes to eat.
New trends of wellness programs incorporate the use ofactivity trackers.
Tracking people? It sounds Big Brother or KGB.
Current Employee participation in corporate wellness programs—even when they are paid for it—is low. Engagement ranged, for example, from 10% (life coaches) to 53% (completing a basic health questionnaire).
RESO Programs do not substitute current employee wellness plans. In fact, we help them to increase their participation rate:
We are complementary because we have different goals.
RESO programs medically treat the causesof obesity/overweight and the harmful effects of stress.
In the 1930s and ‘40s…high volume endurance training was thought to be bad for the heart.
Through the ‘50s and even ‘60s, exercise – which means army in Italian – was thought to beharmful to women.
During that same period the percentage of obese Americans was dramatically lower than today.
While it seems perfectly clear that our lives are less demanding than they were in the 1950s, it’s not necessarily the case that we are cumulatively burning fewer calories.
Some experts say that we are getting heavier because we are using laborsaving devices.
Yet that doesn’t match the data either.
The vast majority of laborsaving devices became common in households decades before obesity shot up: dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and all the major laborsaving devices increased most between 1945 and 1965.
Use of these devices increased very little between 1978 and 1998while obesity shot up.
What about all the TV watching?
Tsinghua University Professor Seth Roberts determined that “time spent watching TV increased by 45 percent from 1965 to 1975, yet obesity increase little over that time.”
From 1975 to 1995, TV watching increased only a little.
These brilliant students wanted to improve their sport performance by implementing a new nutrition plan for the Boston Marathon in 1968:
Glycogen is the sugarlike substance that serves as the main fuel for musclesduring exercise.
High carbs foods are easy and faster to digest.
10 Years later: In 1977, the U.S. Senate Committee on Nutritionissued a set of new recommended dietary goals and changes in dietary patterns from our now well-established students:
Fat-free food leads to fat-free bodies.
What works for us has to work for the rest of the population….
It’s believed that the concept of 10,000 steps originated in Japan in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, says Catrine Tudor-Locke, an associate professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre at Louisiana State University.
Pedometers became all the rage in the country as Olympic fever swept through Japanese society.
Since then the 10,000 steps legend has become a commonly-acknowledged goal for daily fitness around the world. It is roughly equivalent to around five miles each day.
If you normally walk about 5,000 steps a day, getting in an extra 30-minute, brisk walk into your day would take you to about 8,000 steps. The average U.S. adult walks about 5,900 steps daily.
An Oregon State study showed that less than 3% of U.S. adults live a healthy lifestyle.The study looked at 4,745 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The researchers analyzed if adults were successful in four areas that fit typical advice for a “healthy lifestyle”— moderate exercise, a good diet, not smoking and having a recommended body fat percentage.
Out of the study group, 2.7 percent had all four characteristics. Only 11 percent had none.
38 percent of adults ate a healthy diet; 10 percent had anormal body fat percentage, and 46 percent were sufficiently active (150 minutes per week).
When most people think “diet,” they think of eating fruits, veggies and lean protein.
But Mark Haub tried something different.
The professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University put himself on a “convenience store diet” made up of things like Twinkies, Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals.
The twist: He limited his caloric intake to 1,800 calories a day (the average man eats 2,640 calories per day.
In two months, Haub had lost27 pounds and lowered his bad cholesterol by 20%.
Haub’s kind of diet isn’t nutritionally advantageous (though his regimen included vitamin and mineral supplements), but it does show that total calories consumed make a big difference in weight loss.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published the Health, United States, 2016 Report in May 2017:
Aerobic Activities
Federal guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity a week and muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week.
U.S. Food Supply:Nutrients and other food components, per capita per day (Source: USDA)
“Exercising More & Cutting Calories” Myth is dead.
Gold’s gym chain, still going to day, was founded byJoe Gold in 1965 in Venice, California, which became a landmark for bodybuilders (despite the dirty state of its equipment).
Joe Gold founded the World Gym chain in 1977.
More and more gym chains were founded during the 1980s, including24 Hour Fitness(1983) and LA Fitness (1984).
Americans eat an average of 46 slices of pizza per person each year, according to MayoClinic.com.
While pizza can be healthy if you make it the right way, most of the pizza you buy counts as junk food because of the high amount of refined carbs, fat and sodium it contains.
Health studies continue to demonstrate the myriad benefits of lycopene, a phytochemical abundant in tomatoes.
And you get more lycopene from a processed or cooked tomato than you do from a freshly picked one.
Lycopene, responsible for the fruit’s bright red and orange colors, is associated with lower risk of both several types of cancers, including prostate, cervical, skin, breast, and lung.
Lycopene may also helplower the risk of coronary artery diseaseand, along with tomatoes’ vitamin C content, stimulate the immune system.
Cooked tomatoes containtwo to eight times more lycopene than raw because the carotenoid is tightly bound within a tomato’s cell walls.
Heat breaks down those walls, releasing more lycopene for absorption and use by the body.
Canned tomatoes, jarred salsa, spaghetti sauce, tomato paste, tomato soup, and even ketchup are all good sources of lycopene, as are sautéed fresh tomatoes.
Tomatoes also provide iron, potassium, fiber, a host of B vitamins, and quercetin, a phytochemical that may help protect against cancer as well as heart.
Other sources of nutrients in pizza include cheese, which contains calcium, proteinand vitamin A.
Another source of nutrients in pizza is the dough, which contains someantioxidantsdue to the chemical reactions of the yeast. Pizza dough is made from a higher protein flourthan bread dough.
Other vegetable toppings also contain nutrients that promote better health. All vegetables contain fiber, minerals, and vitamins.
