Living Life With Grace

Living Well: Fighting obesity gets harder as trend growsYou can blame obesity on any number of trends: fastfood franchises, supersizing, too much television, modern technology, processed foods, diet soft drinks, lack of exercise and more. There is even one theory that the rise in body weight coincides with reduced aspirations to save money or plan for the future. Sort of an eat-doughnuts today, don't worry about retirement approach.Just how to slow down the obesity epidemic -- heck, even just stagger it momentarily -- comes with about as many theories and possible answers. But one thing is certain. If more Americans become overweight, more Americans will be less inclined to grasp the urgency of finding solutions to an overweight society.Judith Stern, a researcher at the University of CaliforniaDavis, one of the country's academic nutrition centers, has served on an impressive list of blue-ribbon federal panels focused on obesity. She has long made the point that "fit" and "fat" don't have to be mutually exclusive in the body; you can be a bit heavier than the next person but still be able to take the stairs or lift your groceries without incident. That's an important distinction here, yet she wasn't surprised last year when the NPD market research group revealed that in 1985 more than half of all American adults agreed with that statement, "A person who is not overweight is a lot more attractive" while only a quarter of us agreed with that statement in 2006."That doesn't seem strange to me," Stern said. "More people are overweight now and it makes sense that they'd be more accustomed to it. It's reality."And reality is gaining on us.
Fat might be the norm by 2015If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 41% obese and 34% overweight but not obese, U.S. researchers predicted Wednesday.A team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore examined 20 studies published in journals and looked at national surveys of weight and behavior for the analysis, published in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews.Studies show that 66% of U.S. adults were overweight or obese in 2003 and 2004. Among black women 40 or older, 50% are obese and 30% more are overweight.
Eating the cost: Business has reason to help workers lose weightLuckily, employers have many benign ways to lower their workers' weight and thus increase productivity and savings. The key is focusing less on treating obesity-related disease and more on company-sponsored "wellness" programs that ward off worker obesity in the first place.According to Combs' office, these plans can take up to five years to show an economic return. But when they do, the payoff is striking. Every dollar a business spends on employee health promotion equals an average savings of $348 on health care spending per worker per year. The San Antonio-based United Services Automobile Association's wellness program saved more than $105 million in a three-year period, Combs reported.The programs that work best, research shows, goad their workers to walk, quit smoking or eat better with financial incentives.Some of these programs take the form of a stick: Clarian Health in Indiana, for instance, recently said it will charge workers extra on their insurance if they don't take provable action on obesity, smoking or unhealthy cholesterol. While legal, this approach might undermine performance. On the other hand, it's hard to fault either the economics or the inspiration in Boston's Virgin Life Care's new plan. The company, a subsidiary of the British Virgin Group, offers cash rewards for physically active workers. Outfitted with pedometers, the workers can earn up to $400 in cash yearly if they walk enough steps.In the end, it is still the employee who needs to set one foot in front of the other. But for now, workers and employers are expensively bound together. Beating obesity together is one case in which management and employees share equally in the profits.
And while the "obesity epidemic" continues to explode, heart disease deaths drop thanks to treatments and positive lifestyle choices. See here. You'll notice that things like, say, low-carb diets and weight loss surgeries aren't mentioned as the reason for the drop in heart disease deaths.

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