The foundation of any good wellness program must be focused on helping employees adopt healthy behaviors. Elevated blood glucose, high blood cholesterol, and high blood pressure are almost all caused by unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity. Eating and exercising are behaviors.
A randomized clinical trial was designed to help people improve their nutrition and physical activity. When researchers looked at the results, they were stunned to learn that in as little as six weeks health risks could improve dramatically. Those who maintained healthy behaviors experience lower health risks for six weeks, six months, 12 months, and even out to 18 months after this program began.
When you change your diet, get active, and avoid tobacco, really good things happen. Boise School District is a WellSteps client and not long ago we published the results of their changes in health risks. After one year, a lot of employees who had elevated health risks at baseline, had reached healthy risk levels.
Source: JOEM
Reductions in elevated health risks are important. The New England Journal of Medicine reported that for every 1% drop in total cholesterol, the risk of having a heart attack dropped by 2 to 3%. For every one point drop in elevated diastolic blood pressure, there is another 2 to 3% drop in heart disease risk.
Low health risks are the foundation of good health, and wellness programs are a great way to help employees and their spouses avoid elevated health risks. There are hundreds of research papers that evaluated the ability of wellness programs to reduce elevated health risks.
One particular study looking at almost 200,000 wellness participants and showed that 5 0f 7 health risks improved after one year.
Another researcher looked at all of the published studies to get a consensus. This review showed that comprehensive wellness programs will have a significant impact on elevated health risks.
A Weakness of Wellness Programs
There is one weakness that almost all wellness programs have. After 30 years of evaluating dozens and dozens of programs it has become clear that it is difficult to impossible to get large groups of employees to reach and maintain a healthy body weight.
The obesity epidemic is caused by a variety of cultural factors and helping employees lose weight has proven to be exceptionally difficult.
While the research suggests that helping people improve blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose is possible, helping people lose weight and keep the weight off has proven to be hard to do. Just take a look at the body mass index (BMI)data in the table above. Those who are obese do lose some weight after a few years but not very much.
There is some hope. Recently, the RAND study showed some promising results:
Source: Rand Report
If the focus of your wellness program is to help individuals reach and maintain a healthy body weight you should prepare yourself to be disappointed. The unhealthy culture that surrounds most of us makes it extremely difficult to lose weight, in fact, most people in the United States and in the industrialized world gain weight every year.
So there’s a couple ways to look at this. Wellness programs are very effective at reducing elevated health risks like blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol which are all great reasons to have a wellness program. But they are not very effective at helping people lose weight.
Without the impact of all the wellness programs in the world, obesity would be even worse than it currently is.
Wellness programs may not help your employees reach a healthy body weight but it looks like they are helping your employees to stop gaining weight.