Business of Well-being

Food Heals

Food as a healing tool may sound odd on the surface, as we in America have been conditioned to believe that medicine heals. Hippocrates, who lived around 400 BC and is considered the father of medicine, said "let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food," yet the modern medical establishment seems to have forgotten that. In the debate that is now raging on overhauling the health care system, the discussion has centered on reducing overall costs. No one can argue with that when you consider that one third of healthcare costs are administrative.  


Furthermore, Americans pay the highest price in the world for health care yet fare far worse than some third world countries in areas like infant mortality and disease outcome. What then is wrong? Wellness, and indeed corporate wellness by extension, has been viewed solely as early intervention, as an annual physical. Frankly, it's already too late when a test taken during that annual physical comes back with negative results.


At that point, the employee is already ill: a PAP test doesn't prevent cervical cancer; a colonoscopy doesn't prevent colon cancer. No one can argue against the benefits of early intervention but consider how with lifestyle changes, one can make those annual physicals result in only positive results for the employee and the employer.

Lifestyle and disease

Up to 50 percent of healthcare costs can be attributed to lifestyle (diet, smoking, lack of exercise, recreational drugs.) and go towards treating diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes and clinical depression. Another 20 percent is due to duplicate and otherwise unnecessary testing. In a perfect world, we could reduce our health care costs nationally by 70 percent. Alas, we don't live in a perfect world, but would you be satisfied with half of that number? Lifestyle is the decisions we make in food and activities. We tend to think of food and its effect on the body in terms of thermo-dynamics that is, put fuel in the tank and the engine runs.


Food is more than just calories: it is information. The food we eat every day mediates hormones, it "talks" to our DNA, it becomes us. There is truth in the expression you are what you eat. What we eat starts in our mouth, works its way through our stomach and intestines, broken down to the molecular level it is absorbed through the intestinal wall into our bloodstream and literally becomes our cells, our blood, our organs, our bones, etc. To illustrate the notion of the "conversation" our bodies have with food, I have my clients do experiments on different foods, recording how they feel immediately after the meal and then two to three hours later. The results are eye opening.


Disease doesn't just show up on our doorstep, it just becomes apparent at some point on a continuum between healthy and dead. What we do is give a condition a name, then treat the name with pharmaceuticals, therapy or an invasive procedure. Depression is not a Prozac deficiency. Here's an example of how food is too often left out of the equation. A family member had a heart attack a few years back and after treatment finally stopped smoking. This family member then developed what I would term Irritable Bowl Syndrome.


The doctor, after trying a series of medications to no avail, suggested the family member begin smoking a few cigarettes a day as he knew that the nicotine would relieve the condition. It did. What I found odd was that the doctor didn't ask one question about my family member's diet which consists of about five or six cups of coffee day, is high in saturated fat and refined carbohydrates and low in soluble fiber. Seems to me cutting out the coffee alone would have saved those trips to the toilet.

How did we get here?

It is my belief that we arrived at this point due to a combination of political and economic decisions. Our country subsidizes crops that make fast food less expensive than whole food to the tune of twenty billion dollars a year. That money might be better spent on healthcare reform but my intent is not to debate the merits of food subsidies. What is important is that we know how to prevent or reduce the number of the vast majority of the chronic conditions that plague our society today, conditions that have the highest direct and indirect health costs.

What does all this have to do with corporate wellness?

If you have read this site for any length of time, you have no doubt seen articles before on the benefits of corporate wellness programs but let me include some information for completeness sake. For starters, the people whom I referred to above are the very same people who are working for America's large corporations and small companies. For the most part, U.S. corporations pick up the cost for health benefits and through higher premiums are picking the cost of health care for the approximately 50 million Americans who are not insured.


Research suggests the indirect costs of poor health may be two to three times the actual medical costs. Unhealthy employees are more likely to be absent, are usually less productive and more likely to suffer from presenteeism, my word to mean the employee is on the job physically but not mentally. Focusing resources on prevention rather than cure is much less costly than treatment as shown in the study "Overweight Prevalence, Data for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 2, 2009," and the study "Work life Wellness: Why Employers Should Care about Employee Health and Wellness, by John Bates, Infinite Wellness Solutions, 2009."


Without an effective corporate wellness program, a company has employees who are making more medical claims driving up direct medical costs and insurance costs and adding to the indirect costs of lower productivity, higher absenteeism, possess less vitality, are less effective while on the job and produce a lower quality of work. How do we know corporate wellness works? Consider the results of an ongoing study done at a New Jersey based corporation. Their goal was to produce a wellness program that improved productivity, motivate talent, attract and retain highly productive employees and add a level of social responsibility.


Their method was to increase physical activity through on site activities and making gym memberships more available to employees, encourage healthy eating habits by revamping cafeteria offerings, reevaluating the foods brought in for business meetings and having a series of healthy eating seminars and workshops. Lastly, they targeted chronic disease intervention through lifestyle-stress/anxiety: surveys to assess stress, anxiety and depression levels with follow-up (yoga, talks on stress management, flower arranging classes, etc.) The results were astounding.


Their fitness index, which was the composite of body mass index, blood cholesterol, physical fitness and stress/anxiety levels, started at 25 percent and increased to 75 percent in first year, 81 percent in subsequent two years. The undesirable cholesterol levels went from 46 percent to 29 percent. Absenteeism was reduced by 20 percent, and the average sick leave was reduced from 5.5 days (per employee/year) to 4.4 days. Turnover was reduced from 5.9 percent in 2004 to 4.5 percent in 2007.

What about food?

The above study underscores my first assumption and title of this article that food not only prevents illness but also heals once signs of illness occur. A review of the statistics from the study will show dramatic decreases in disease with a change in diet, an increase in physical activity and the addressing of such things as stress. Let's look at this in terms of inflammation brought on by diet. Why inflammation, you say? Stick with me, and you will see. First, some definitions. For the purposes of this discussion, there are two types of inflammation.


Type 1 or the classical type of inflammation is associated with pain. You have pain, you see a doctor perhaps, or you take an over the counter remedy and your pain subsides. Type 2 inflammation on the other hand is silent inflammation it is below the threshold of pain and we don't recognize it. At some point, the Type 2, silent inflammation, becomes Type 1 and we recognize it as pain, we see a doctor and begin treatment. It is a result of the same class of hormones that cause Type 1 inflammation. Medical science knows from research that many if not all of chronic diseases are associated with Type 2 inflammation.


Those diseases include but are not limited to: obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart failure, Alzheimer's, cancer, asthma and simple allergies. We tend not to look at food as a drug but food is the strongest mediator of hormones in the body that we know of. By regulating or eliminating the production of the hormones that cause inflammation, we can reduce or eliminate the occurrence of Type 2 inflammation in our bodies. It follows then that we can reduce the instance of the diseases that are associated with this inflammation.  Not only then does a wellness program make employees feel better and perform better in the short run, it makes them healthier in the long run by mitigating Type 2 inflammation.

Keys to a successful program

From the standpoint of food, every corporate wellness program you consider should be based on the following principles:

  1. Bio-individuality one diet plan does not work for everyone. The health counselor running your program should take into account these differences and this is not that administratively difficult to do.
  2. What I call primary food should be integrated with secondary food.  Healthy living is not an exercise in discipline; if it is made so, it is doomed to failure long term. The employees' mood and environment [stress, working conditions, relationships, etc.] influence what we eat and when more than we think.
  3. Allow your employees, with the guidance of the health counselor, to deconstruct cravings by listening to their bodies' messages. Our bodies never make mistakes and when we become aware of the messages it is sending us, we begin to opt for healthier diet alternatives.
  4. Any program you embark on should be no shorter than three months in length and optimally six months in length as it takes about that much time for habits to change.

Conclusion

The most important tool we have in preventing disease is our fork. We have the means to avoid or eliminate many of the chronic conditions we face today by taking a closer look at what we eat. We are not all the same; each of us has a unique set of DNA. There are many types of diets, many types of mediating substances and not everything works for everybody. But we do know that diet and lifestyle change do work for everybody. Food not only heals but prevents illness from beginning. A successful corporate wellness program centered on food choices will not only reduce expenses but increase the vitality and productivity of employees. So, eat a lot but not too much; eat whole, locally grown and organic, when possible, food from a variety of sources and make the plate as colorful as possible. That will go a long way to improving the health of employees.

Credits

I wish to thank Dr. Barry Spears, PhD, Dr. Mark Hyman, MD, and Mr. Joshua Rosenthal for some of the information in this article, and for their tireless effort in improving the health of America.

About the Author

Nicholas Merolla is the owner of New Millennium Wellness, and is a Certified Health Counselor, a  Certified Exercise Specialist, and a former Athletic Competitor. Nick worked in for Fortune 100 companies for a good part of his career. He decided to become a health counselor to fulfill his passion of working with men and women of all ages to improve their health and family life. Nick is certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine and the American Counsel on Exercise.


Nick received his health counseling training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City.  He is certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners and the State University of New York, Purchase College as a Health Counselor, and leads workshops on nutrition, and offers individual health and nutrition coaching to individuals, groups, and provides corporate wellness programs; and is also available for speaking engagements.Nick can be reached at 201-488-3236 or by email at nick@newmillenniumwellness.com

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