An Apple A Day or A Bad Apple?

I was recently listening to an episode of This American Life titled, "Ruining It For The Rest of Us" where they featured stories about how easily one person's behavior can have a contaminating effect on others. One particularly haunting story covered the research of Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who placed a confederate in a group and observed the impact that this "bad apple" had on the rest of the group. In nearly every case the influence of even one spoiler tarnished the productivity and the morale of the group.
One thing that the researchers in Phelp's study didn't look at, however, is that poor health can impact mood. Could an apple a day and a brief jaunt outdoors help the bad apple get his mood back on track? Or could workplace health and wellness be a protective means of coping for those who might otherwise be affected by a bad apple?

How do health and mood interact in your workplace? Have you seen an instance where a bad apple lowered the productivity of a work group and subsequently led to more sick days or a reluctance of team members to show up for work?

Food Or Thought: continued

Several blog posts ago we discussed some of the key issues facing us as eaters and as citizens in what has come to be known as the 'industrial food complex'--our current food system.

Now that spring has begun to work its reliable magic on US agricultural and wild land and thoughts of early spring berries replace those of wintertime squash, it's the perfect time to bring this conversation 'home.'

Why local matters

Problem: The most prolific ingredients in the processed foods that Americans consume--wheat, soy, rice, or corn---are highly caloric, long lasting, cheap food products often shipped thousands of miles (oil, oil, oil).







Next time you're standing in front of your pantry, examine a box of pasta, a bag of chips, or a jar of tomato sauce.

• How many ingredients does the product contain?
• Do you know what these ingredients are?
• Where does the product come from?
• How far has it traveled to get to you?
• How were these commodity crops raised?

By now many of us are familiar with the impact that industrialized and large scale commercial farming and monoculture can have on the environment and our health. In growing, the key element to producing quality food is soil richness. Building rich soils (as nature has done for millennia) is a slow process.

Soils don't seem to understand the pressures that the business cycle places on farming for profit, and many agricultural practices used to accelerate crop growth can contaminate ground water, erode the soil, leach nutrients into water bodies - disrupting the ecology and fisheries that we rely upon. A picture of the Dust Bowl (below) shows just how badly things can get when natural wind systems interact with environments that have been stripped of their protective layer of top soil.


Solution: Eat close to home

You, like many people, are probably looking for ways to answers some of the nagging questions above, without having to find a personal solution that means you quit your job to become a full time food systems researcher. One easy way to make this thoughtful transition without having to research every item on your shelves is to build a relationship with a local grower and have your produce freshly delivered through a CSA.

A summary from LocalHarvest.org:
"Over the last 20 years, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has become a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Here are the basics: a farmer offers a certain number of "shares" to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership" or a "subscription") and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.

Advantages for consumers:

• Eat ultra-fresh food, with all the flavor and vitamin benefits
• Get exposed to new vegetables and new ways of cooking
• Usually get to visit the farm at least once a season
• Find that kids typically favor food from "their" farm – even veggies they've never been known to eat
• Develop a relationship with the farmer who grows their food and learn more about how food is grown
• Directly support their local agricultural economy
  

Advantages for farmers:

• Get to spend time marketing the food early in the year, before their 16 hour days in the field begin
• Receive payment early in the season, which helps with the farm's cash flow
• Have an opportunity to get to know the people who eat the food they grow

Recess wants to point out a few advantages of promoting local food for employers:

• Be an advocate for health behavior change---many CSAs will deliver weekly shares to a business with enough season 'share-holders'
• Chronic diseases are costly and correlated to poor diet and lack of physical activity---help your employees discover real food and reduce their risk
  
• Foster a culture of health with an employee-family day at your local farm or farmers market

If you live in Portland, Oregon for example, purchasing a season share at a local CSA farm, or regularly visiting a farmers market gives you access to the freshest most local food that you could possibly buy. By investing your money locally, supporting a small business while helping preserve important agricultural land, as the Oregon Environmental Council puts it, you will 'vote with your fork.'

So the question is: Do you want to cast your vote for food shipped from thousands of miles away, or is it worth the wait for those amazing, fresh April strawberries to suddenly appear in your weekly basket or local market---followed by tomatoes, squash, and beets still smelling of the soil from which they emerged just hours before? Shrink the food system, and watch our landscape explode with real food!

Sending Your Employees to Fat Camp

Every kid can probably remember a schoolmate who was sent away to fat camp and forced to endure not only the mockery of fellow children, but also bland, paltry portions of undressed salad and other "diet" foods. Losing weight was never cool, but with the mercurial rise of reality shows, even fat camp has been buffed to a high gloss. Shows like The Biggest Loser and other reality diet shows feature die hard trainers who effectively supplant the participants' "lack of will" with their own shrill and uberfit war cries. They harass participants through bootcamp-like workouts (4-6 hours worth at a pop) and analyze their every bite. The results are - well - dramatic enough to capture the attention of a rapt television audience.

Corporate wellness programs seem to be picking up on the trend. Home grown Biggest Loser competitions are popping up all over in America's offices. Sure, this approach can work. Particularly when on someone else's dime and exercising 4-6 hours a day, but for the average working Joe or Josephine, dramatic weight loss can be a setup for disappointment.

And for the ambitious wellness program director? For starters your program might not actually be reaching the least healthy among your workers. A skinny pack a day smoker who does not exercise (unless you count lifting beer to mouth) and has a family history of illness may not have a lot to lose when it comes to shedding pounds.

While it may be tempting to assume that we can look at someone who is obese or overweight and judge their level of health, studies show that a moderately active obese or overweight worker is at less risk of disease than a thin co-worker with high stress, sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep habits, and a lousy diet. Some of the more serious risk factors for cardiac conditions and stroke (think cholesterol and high blood pressure) are not necessarily something you can determine by looking at a scale.

On top of that, if there are big prizes on the line there are actually plenty of unhealthy ways to show dramatic weight loss (think: dehydration, binging, diuretics, stimulants). About 65% of the human body is made of water. Do the math on that. Ask any amateur wrestler (you know the guys who basically wear garbage bags as they run around the block prior to being weighed in) and they can give you a few easy hints for ways to manipulate scale weight. Such tactics can dramatically alter scale weight; however, they put unnecessary stress on the body (dehydration and muscle loss) and the results are typically temporary at best.

Additionally, men have an advantage in the weight loss game. Men's hormonal makeup allows their bodies to rev up the fat burning engines. Women, and particularly those undergoing hormonal changes such as menopause, can still see tremendous benefits from exercise, but thanks to their hormones and body composition will see more gradual weight loss than most men.

So to recap:

• 'Skinny smokers' have little incentive to get healthy - there's not much to lose and have you ever tried running a mile after a cig? It's not fun.
  
• Weight Loss competitions unnecessarily shame larger people. Health and its relationship to weight is complex. You could be singling out otherwise healthy people based mainly on their appearance, which is not exactly a textbook team building approach.
  
• The fix is in. Offering prizes can emphasize unhealthy weight loss methods and put men at an advantage over women.
• The graph below shows average excess medical cost per employee of various health risks. Do you think the Biggest Loser is going to do much to reduce the first two?

If your wellness goal is to improve the health of your workforce, emphasize friendly competition and team spirit, and improve productivity then is fat camp really for you?