How your job contributes to lifestyle diseases

• Posted on May 4, 2018
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Some people are lucky to have food served to them at the workplace. But what could be considered as luck brings them no luck at all.

After eating office food for a few years, you will see people suffering from one or more of the lifestyle diseases.

This is simply because of the unhealthy nature of the food served at the office. There is so much oil, salt and frying.

Oil, salt and fried foods only become bad when they are consumed in large quantities and on very frequent basis.

This is exactly the case with what you eat at the office. It is convenient and eaten on a daily basis.

If organisations will take an interest in the healthy nature of the food employees eat at work, they will have a healthier workforce.

In the medium to long term, they will also spend less on healthcare costs.

The benefit workers can get from eating healthly while at work is their own wellbeing.

There is nothing stopping anyone from enjoying healthy meals at work. You just have to decide and take steps towards achieving this.

Offer some training to your catering service provider and they will do better.

This however can only happen if you all agree on the need for a change.

If it becomes impossible to change the status quo at the workplace, you have to send your own food along to work.

Cook the food well and carry it along for lunch.

I am very sure doing so will help curb the menace of diabetes, hypertension, among others.

Stress from the workplace has its own place in contributing to the numbers of people suffering from the lifestyle diseases.

Bringing stress levels down is key in preventing and managing lifestyle diseases.

Stress

Having stress levels under control will also free up space in your mind so you plan to eat healthy meals.

Being realistic with work targets and meeting goals is a way to manage stressors and minimise stress.

Also getting some exercise can help reduce stress levels significantly. 
Work schedules are likely to make it difficult for lots of people to seek health care in a timely manner if they fall sick.

If you continue postponing the need to see your health care provider because of your tight schedules, you might soon become an emergency case. Choose right.

In a bid to manage their health care quota, some workers who have such benefits may selectively seek health care when they are not well.

Some people will also selectively buy drugs that they have been asked by doctors to buy.

Once these dynamics begin to set in, success with the management of lifestyle diseases becomes impossible.

You will see people taking for example their high blood pressure drugs only when their readings go high.

On days that the readings are not very high, the drugs are not taken. Doing this is very dangerous and must be discouraged.

Worrying trend

Another worrying trend when payment for healthcare becomes an issue is the fact that sufferers of lifestyle diseases will not go to the hospital unless they fall sick.

Meanwhile those who keep such appointments are able to adequately deal with factors that bring along the lifestyle diseases.

Even those suffering from lifestyle diseases are able to control them better when they keep a dietician’s appointment as well.

What will you want your health status to be like after you retire from your current employment at age 60?

Also, at what age do you wish to die and leave the face of the earth? I believe most of us will want to be healthy after retirement.

Also, most of us will want to come to our graves in ripe old age.

May this be your portion as scripture puts it succinctly: “You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, and as a shock of grain goes up [to the threshing floor] in its season (Job 5:26)”.

A little bit of planning will help you achieve better outcomes so far as prevention and management of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, among others are concerned.

Allowing your work to get in the way of achieving good control for these diseases/conditions will make them worry you now, and even more when you are on

I believe we will all choose not to allow our work schedules to make us victims to lifestyle diseases.

Author: Jennifer Ofori-Boateng