First Offices, Then Apartments, Now Gyms? WeWork Launches New Wellness Concept – Forbes, October 17, 2017
WeWork, the co-working giant, is turning up the heat on competitors with a new wellness and fitness concept, the just-launched Rise by We, which provides a mix of wellness classes and spa offerings including yoga and meditation, functional training, kickboxing and other fat-burning classes.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology recently went to three American scientists for their fascinating research on how an internal “biological clock” drives all living things. They identified the molecule existing in almost every cell of our bodies revealing that everything from our brain to our “gut” synchs to natural circadian rhythms.
Read more about how messing with our internal “biological clock” impacts everything from hormone levels to heart rate. And how this surprising Nobel Prize is a testimony to the rising importance of wellness in our everyday lives.
The global food landscape is paradoxical. Fast food consumption rages on in middle-income countries, and in places like Argentina and Ghana, where it’s recently skyrocketed. On the other hand, large multinational companies are fast acquiring healthy food/beverage start-ups to meet consumer demand. And veganism and vegetarianism are seeing staggering growth in Western nations (much driven by millennials).
A recent study (Univ. of E. Finland, studying 1,621 men over 25 years) suggests that regular trips to the sauna can significantly reduce high blood pressure. Those who did two to three sauna sessions/week were 24% less likely to have hypertension, and four to seven visits cut the risk by 46%. The researchers noted: “This is good news…A healthy thing that is pleasant to do, and involves no sacrifice.”
On Oct. 9, the Global Wellness Institute launched a “Wellness Moonshot” – whose mission is a world free of preventable disease. Top medical leaders spoke on what’s most needed to achieve this ambitious but critical goal. Dr. Andrew Weil argued that because it all comes down to lifestyle change, we simply must do more to make those changes easier: for instance, the cheapest, most available food right now is the least healthy…that must change. Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic noted that to achieve the moonshot we need a serious change in the medical reimbursement model: preventative wellness needs to be rewarded more, or at least equally, to illness care.
The first of the GWI’s Wellness at Work Initiative’s new infographics on workplace wellness.
