MONTHLY BAROMETER – WELLNESS EDITION Two key developments in workplace wellness: 1) Unwellness at work is becoming one of the big elephants in the corporate boardroom. As a revealing example, in 2017–2018 in the UK, stress, depression and anxiety accounted for more than half (57 percent) of total working days lost due to ill health. The issue of mental health in the workplace seems to…
A new study from the University of Otago, New Zealand, on the Mediterranean, paleo and intermittent-fasting diets compared how well people were able to stick to them and each diet’s outcomes for weight loss and overall health. Less than a third of people stuck to paleo, 57 percent stuck to a Mediterranean diet, and 54 percent stuck to intermittent fasting over the year-long study. The…
A new study from a very prestigious group of doctors has dire projections for the US: By 2030, nearly 1 in 2 Americans will be obese, and 1 in 4 will be severely obese. In addition, severe obesity will be the most common weight bracket for women, low-income adults and black adults across the US. This is a quite sudden crisis: Americans weren’t always this…
When people think “wellness,” they probably don’t think hand-washing. But given the coronavirus crisis, it may be the single most selfless and effective thing you can do to stop the outbreak. James Hamblin, MD, in this month’s Atlantic, explains the power of washing your hands, how most of us do it for 5 seconds when we need to do it for 20, and how the…
MONTHLY BAROMETER – WELLNESS EDITION The spread of the new coronavirus is accelerating. According to health experts, the reproduction number, estimated at between 2 and 3 (on average, every infected person infects from 2 to 3 new people), makes an immediate containment of the outbreak elusive. It is still impossible to tell whether the outbreak will cause lasting and critical damage to China and the…
From a wellness perspective, one of the “hot” issues that will make the headlines in 2020 is air pollution. The reason is simple: Climate change is making it far worse. The reasons are twofold: (1) When the air is dryer and hotter, it doesn’t wash pollution out of the atmosphere as quickly as it would otherwise; (2) global warming exacerbates air pollution by trapping tiny…
