We all dread the annual winter sickness. It comes, usually without warning, and stays longer than we want. We’re sniffly, sneezy, achey and in general malaise for much longer than we can afford to be. Even when things start to clear up, we still don’t feel quite 100 percent. The thing is, all that can be avoided if we keep our immune system running to its fullest potential. In addition to regular, and I do mean regular exercise, the best way to stave off sickness is by making sure your body is running on the best fuel possible for the dark days and long nights of winter.
You don’t need 10 steps or 20 or even five to make sure you are eating the right things at the right times. Over at HealthCastle.com they narrowed it down to four simple, easy-to-remember tips to help you get properly fueled and free of colds, flus and all other annoying and clingy winter ailments. Please head over and check out their full article, but for now here are their four steps to eating properly this winter. Take special note of number three, and remember that we just did a post about exactly that! Here we go:
- Eat high-quality carbs: Listen to your cravings. There is a reason for them! In the winter, with fewer sunny hours, your stored serotonin (the “feel-good” brain chemical) starts to decline. Your cravings for carbohydrate-loaded comfort foods are your body crying for more serotonin. But be careful when choosing carbohydrates to boost serotonin! Opt for nutritious whole grains and choose high-quality carbs, such as sweet potatoes, pumpkins and squashes.
- Love seasonal produce: Winter produce may not be as exciting and colorful as summer berries, but there are still many healthy choices available. Work seasonal produce, including pomegranates, cranberries, citrus fruits, purple grapes and orange root vegetables, into your meals. You’ll not only add color to your plate, you’ll pack in some serious nutrition punch.
- Consider Vitamin D supplements: If you live in the northern hemisphere, consider taking vitamin D supplements. Numerous studies have shown that oral intake of vitamin D can reduce the risk of colon, breast and ovarian cancers by as much as 50 percent. Vitamin D can be found in fortified dairy products, fatty fish and egg yolks. But reaching the recommended level through food alone is rather difficult. Therefore, the Canadian Cancer Society recommends that all adults take vitamin D supplements every day during the fall and winter seasons. Be sure to speak to your doctor before starting any supplementation.
- Nourish your cold: No diet remedy or supplement has been scientifically proven to prevent cold and flu. However, studies have shown that vitamin C supplements may make your cold milder and shorten it by half a day. In addition, there’s a promising perk for yogurt lovers! A German study found that probiotics (as found in yogurt with active culture) may shorten your cold episode by almost two days. So keep on eating those “friendly bugs!”
It’s winter but it doesn’t have to be miserable. Before you know it, we’ll be posting about the glory of warm spring weather and how to avoid sunburn!
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
Anybody who has ever made an effort to be healthier knows that “health” is an elusive concept that isn’t easily achieved. Unhealthy habits and routines are hard to break.
Our consumer innovation team has been focused for the last two years on “making fun healthy.” The most successful “changes” are ones that fit naturally into a person’s life. They’re fun. They incorporate health into something people already enjoy doing. You can read more about our wellness philosophy here. Even in our own lives, we look for ways to take our normal “life-flow” and inject some health into it (like having walkstations on the floor, and having bikesharing to get from place to place downtown). I like to think about health-injected lifeflows as “micro-enablers” of good health.
But everyone’s lives have obstacles to health, too. For example, it tends to be both difficult and expensive to buy healthy food and prepare it. It is cheaper and easier to eat unhealthy food.
There are a lot of companies that have recognized the value of a healthier work force (Pitney Bowes is a great example), and are trying to make it easier for their employees to be healthy. Humana has an on-site health club that offers cheaper membership for people that go a lot (but not free – that’s another premise that’s worthy of a separate blog post). Our cafeteria always offers healthy choices, and sometimes they’re subsidized.
But in addition to enabling good health, lots of companies put up obstacles, too. I’m co-leading a “tweetchat” focused on workplace wellness, and it’s caused me to want to find a way to shine a light on the obstacles companies put up – and to tear them down.
A lot of corporate cultures frown on taking time out to do ANYTHING – even exercise, except maybe at lunch. A lot of corporate cultures emphasize clock-punching. Employees are expected to come in early, stay late and be on call at all times.
A lot of times the salad bar is one of the most expensive ways to eat in the cafeteria. That makes sense because fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive and perishable. But if you really want to encourage employees to eat better, you have to tip the scales financially in favor of veggies.
There are wellness programs, but they are almost always uninspired (payroll stuffers, anyone?) and difficult to find and use.
Wellness programs and incentives often aren’t connected to one another.
None of these problems are insurmountable. But they can aggregate into some pretty serious obstacles. I’m convinced that if companies got really serious about identifying and obliterating their micro-obstacles, they’d make giant strides in enabling – and even encouraging – a healthier and more engaged work force. The first step is identification. I’ve thought of a few things that I consider to be micro-obstacles to workplace wellness. What did I miss? What are the obstacles you’ve seen in your own work force? And what innovative things have you seen that overcome the obstacles? What would you like to see?
Photo by sokisoy
[Editor's note: The concept of "Micro-Obstacles" will be one of the topics on this month's CoHealth tweetchat on Wednesday, February 17th. CoHealth is a "workplace wellness cooperative" focused on health at work.]
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
The US has lost ground in recent years to other leading industrial nations in attracting new generations to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. This has resulted in decreased enrollment rates in STEM college and university programs. Much of this trend is related to issues of global outsourcing of many of the related jobs in established industries, thus eliminating corresponding career incentives for high-school graduates. Industry and academia are in agreement that this educational trend is threatening the US economic and intellectual future and is one of the biggest challenges for current generations. Other reasons are related to an antiquated school system that has not changed significantly since the industrial revolution, and is, therefore, still favoring universal education over academic excellence on the PK-12 level.
National reform of our public school systems will take a long time, so one shorter-term solution is to specifically on women and minorities that are traditionally underrepresented in these careers. We need to find new approaches to attract minority groups to STEM programs, plain and simple.
One way we might do that is to embed STEM curriculum into currently desirable career fields. For instance, in a previous career at the University of Rhode Island, I wrapped traditional computer science education into the context of game design in order to attract more students. Another related initiative combined
colleagues’ traditional STEM education with industrially relevant experiences and international exchange in order to emphasize the diversity and breadth of related career paths.
I will admit, however, that while this kind of approach can demonstrate isolated successes, it cannot change fundamental issues in career choice that are closely tied to gender differences: Although girls increasingly outperform boys in K-16 education, consequential female dominance does not seem to translate well into higher education or even STEM careers.
An extensive body of scientific research suggests that the apparent difference of career choice is in part related to gender differences in risk preferences, social preferences and competitive preferences. These differences have largely evolutionary roots, leading apparently – together with workplace discrimination and social acceptance pressure – to women’s ‘attraction’ to jobs with lower mean, lower-variance salaries. This relationship between evolved gender differences and occupational segregation might be hard to influence, so a bigger benefit may come from channeling these differences into new opportunities:
“The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones.”
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What about healthcare reform?
It is widely accepted that healthcare reform will heavily rely on information and telecommunication technologies. Whether you are talking about electronic medical records or personal health records, telemedicine, telemonitoring or teleconsultation, online social communities of interest, remote caregiving, or Aging in Place, the trend from provider-centric healthcare to home- and individual-centered health and wellness is on the horizon.
This new found demand is creating an unprecedented need for scientific, technological, and engineering innovations. The corresponding career paths have the potential to combine both the job recognition and safety with the social content and rewards according to studies sought after by many women.
Could a potential to channel gender differences into new opportunities lie somewhere within healthcare reform? Early signs point to yes. Women are at the forefront of many of the emerging multidisciplinary research fields underlying the aforementioned healthcare IT R&D opportunities. These research fields combine aspects of Computer Science and Computer Engineering with Psychology, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Medicine and Communication and include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Privacy Engineering, Health Communications (incl. Games for Health), Assistive Robots, and Online Social Networking, to mention a few. These women are the role models for new generations of women in STEM careers.
However, the emergence of such role models and the mere existence of the described opportunities for reform in health, wellness, and STEM education are not enough to catalyze the rapid change that is required. STEM education reformers are struggling to understand how to attract women and minorities to traditional STEM higher-education programs. There is also a struggle in determining how to develop frameworks for providing stronger workplace support for these underrepresented groups in STEM careers.
Where are the STEM curricula and initiatives specifically addressing the opportunities promised by home-centered healthcare and personalized health and wellness?
Where are the interdisciplinary centers communicating these opportunities to today’s high-school graduates?
And where are the public-private partnerships that can provide political decision makers with the implementation frameworks to link healthcare reform to STEM education reform?
The answers to these questions will not come from tweaking standardized testing or from providing in schools an additional hour of health and wellness per week … So where will they come from?
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
