By Thierry Malleret, economist Barring a catastrophic deterioration in trade and international relations around the world, tourism in general and wellness tourism in particular, will continue to thrive and expand at a much faster pace than global GDP. As a reminder, international tourism rose from 500 million trips in 1995 to 1.3 billion last year. With the explosion of the “emerging middle class”, the number is expected to…
By Thierry Malleret, economist An alarming trend: how the rates of obesity just continue to worsen in the United States. According to recent data from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the epidemic shows no signs of abating. Nearly four out of 10 adults are obese; for children, it’s nearly two out of 10. A recent projection from Harvard University indicates that most of today’s…
THE BUSINESS OF WELLNESS Facebook (since June) has been deleting dozens of pages focused on alternative health and natural remedies – just after founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he would start cracking down on fake news. The Global Freedom Movement reports that the social media platform has now purged over 80 accounts (some large, some small) and that “no reason was provided. No responses to inquiries…
Wellness Evidence A large new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings shows that for overweight people, all weight loss is healthy, but the more pounds shed the more dramatic the impact on cutting one’s risk for metabolic syndrome – unhealthy conditions including high blood pressure, insulin resistance, excess waist fat, high triglycerides and low HDL (“good”) cholesterol. Compared to people who maintained less than a…
Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not – The New York Times, August 21, 2018 Observing that the impressive postwar rise in material wellbeing in the US has had zero effect on personal wellbeing, the author of The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 elaborates on two key findings: (1) All happiness is local: people’s wellbeing depends mainly on their immediate…
In the wellness space, there is always a vexing question: Do corporate workplace wellness programs work as well as we think they do? New research based on the first large randomized controlled trial (much more reliable and useful than the more common observational trials) suggests perhaps not. The study focused on a wellness program at the University of Illinois in which almost 5,000 employees volunteered…
