Recent inquiries into the enormous cost that obesity imposes on society have covered a number of bases, but (no surprise here) plenty of angles remain to be explored. In observing places of employment, scholars have examined chronic stressors, acute stressors, and even the condition known as “turmoil in the workplace.” Many researchers are particularly interested in the relationship between those factors and the difficulty experienced by workers in maintaining a healthy body weight.
It seems odd that people — many of them lucky to be employed at all — will carelessly endanger their jobs and their health by allowing excessive weight to creep up on them. How can they be encouraged to remain well enough to perform the work adequately, and not take too many sick days? How can they be prevented from doing things on company time that will eventually cost the company many dollars?
It takes all kinds
Researchers looking for answers have created studies that concentrate specifically on middle-aged women. Grad students have scrutinized groups of men who do exhausting labor, and others whose pale shirt collars have never felt a drop of perspiration. They have probed the relationship between something called “job enrichment,” and abdominal obesity in particular, as those two factors may impact even “apparently healthy” individuals.
A typical news item, published near the end of 2017, confirmed what many corporate CEOs and small business owners had already figured out:
The increasingly high levels of overweight and obesity among the workforce are accompanied by a hidden cost burden due to losses in productivity.
That meta-study was called by its authors “a narrative synthesis of the reviewed studies [which] revealed substantial costs due to lost productivity among workers with obesity.” The information, derived from eight electronic databases, pointed out the extent of those indirect costs that might someday, somehow, be eliminated from the figures that populate the corporate budget. It was only one of a great number of academic papers that have explored these possibilities.
But what does this have to do with my kids?
Everything. No matter how much we love our children, and how wonderful we know them to be in every way, the opinion of the outside world may differ. Often, when that assessment is made plain, the results are not happy for anyone. Our kids are growing up in an environment where everyone is increasingly scrutinized from many angles, and information is retained forever.
They deserve our help
A few years from now, our daughters and sons might be secretly weighed every day they show up for work, and then be summarily fired for exceeding the decreed correct weight. These trends are capable of doing real damage, and we need to get a handle on them by understanding why it is probably a mistake to ignore the few extra pounds around a child’s middle. Without being hurtfully judgmental, we can still acknowledge that obesity has the power to mess up her, or his, entire future.
On another level, the situation could become even worse. Imagine this: Your child graduates high school, and the only available job is with a company that severely maintains strict weight standards. A year later, your excellent son is required to fire an employee who also happens to be his best friend since childhood. To both of them, it represents a betrayal, and your boy feels so lousy, he binge-eats to improve his mood, and winds up being fired himself, not long afterward.
Okay, maybe that scenario is a bit dramatic, but whether we like it or not, obesity seems determined to become a larger issue with every passing year. It is a challenge that a lot of kids just might face, if they don’t already. This is why we try to prevent childhood obesity, because people growing into adulthood have enough to contend with.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Productivity loss due to overweight and obesity: a systematic review of indirect costs,” NIH.gov, 10/05/17
Image by milaoktasafitri/Pixabay
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