Study: Fat workers cost employers more

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
Mon Apr 23, 7:07 PM ET

CHICAGO - Overweight workers cost their bosses more in injury claims than their lean colleagues, suggests a study that found the heaviest employees had twice the rate of workers' compensation claims as their fit co-workers.

Obesity experts said they hope the study will convince employers to invest in programs to help fight obesity. One employment attorney warned companies that treating fat workers differently could lead to discrimination complaints.

Duke University researchers also found that the fattest workers had 13 times more lost workdays due to work-related injuries, and their medical claims for those injuries were seven times higher than their fit co-workers.

Overweight workers were more likely to have claims involving injuries to the back, wrist, arm, neck, shoulder, hip, knee and foot than other employees.

-snip-

These types of studies seem to come out almost daily now.

:popcorn:

It's fattening you know. :hi:

a fact is a fact.

Transfat is a reconformation phenomenon caused by the hydrogenation of polyunsaturated chains in the fat or oil. Butter isn't hydrogenated, because it has a high enough saturated fat content to solidify on its own.

Now, if you meant margarine, then we're talking.
The Professor

Some fats and oils can be fractionally crystallized. That means slowly lowering the temperature of a molten fat or liquid oil (fats are from animals, oils are from plants, but they're identical in chemical structure) and then filtering out the things that plate out first.

This way you get the monounsaturates and saturated fats that are in regular butter, but from a plant. So, it's cholesterol free (although there are other sterols in plant oils) and since it was never hydrogenated, no transfats.

Since they have the right distribution of chain lengths, and saturate/unsaturate ratio, then can add more water.

So, lower fat, no xfats, and no cholesterol. More expensive, but better for you.
The Professor

Sorry. Once a chemist, always a chemist. You can take the boy out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the boy.
The Professor

If you think real butter is typically used on movie theater popcorn, I'm sorry to have to break it to you. They call it "butter" but for several decades, it has been largely trans-fat laden "butter"-flavored sludge. Some theaters today are responding to concerns over trans-fats by switching to coconut oil or real butter, trading one problem for another: transfats for saturated fat.

Even if the OP didn't mean it that way.

Just watch: this one will be fun.

:popcorn:

People have told me that I look a little like John Stamos! :evilgrin:

Good try, though.

:donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut: :donut:

:spray:



:rofl:

If anyone believes employers will use these studies to do anything but discriminate against overweight employees, I have a bridge to sell you....:sarcasm:

And overweight persons already have image issues to overcome with propective employers, just as aging employees do.

I'll probably keep dyeing my hair as I age to keep them guessing.

Edited for typing errors.

or even on-site exercise facilities and healthy food in the cafeteria?

One can dream.

that IRS allows you to use (taxfree) to pay for medical expenses not covered by insurance DISALLLOW anything preventive, like gym memberships UNLESS you are in cardica rehab, or something similar. Meaning they force you to DEVELOP the problem, rather than PREVENT it, in order to use YOUR money to pay for the program.....:eyes:

A $100 dollar PCP appointment to maintian a chronic illness versus $25,000 plus for an amputation plus ching ching for the referring doc means mucho bucks when you are sicker. And uninsured to boot. Hence all the bankruptcies.

to pay for a trainer. You'll need a note from your physician, which will most likely cost you an office visit.

It's the money up-front that gets a bit spendy -- one must pay for the trainer up-front and ask to be reimbursed.

Julie

Great insurance, no complaints -- but even though there's a gym right there on campus, you have to pay a steep fee to use it. That, I don't get.

implemented these strategies. Too bad they don't give their employees time to use them. My dad is salaried on about 15 hour shifts right now.

:eyes:

I cup of turnip soup a day without the turnips and 3 ounces of wormy bread.

but since I saw there was another posting about Sprawl = Obesity, I thought it might be related.

The "fat people" threads on DU can get tres flamey.

...or are you speaking only of individual issues?

The longer the commutes, the longer (and more sedentary) the working hours and add stress which has a fat converting/preserving effect...

Poor diets and lack of exercise are obviously the proximal issues, but our society is currently encouraging the problem (and Americans) to only get BIGGER.

Whether it's extreme sports, obesity, smoking, risky sex behaviour, you name it - if we discriminated against everyone with a lifestyle risk factor that could cost more money for the employer, we'd have precious few people employable anymore.

Besides, at this point, most companies only offer crappy HMO plans with little choice of doctors, huge copayments and the employee has to pay half the premium. (if they offer health coverage at all)

I agree with the other posters who say this just seems like another excuse to discriminate.

Anyway, employers can make employees wear riciculous costumes...




So if employers are really serious about employees' health, maybe they should have a policy that all employees go up on the roof and do calisthenics for a half hour each morning like some companies here in J-land do.




But enough of blaming people for insurance premiums when we all know the system is designed to gouge at all levels.

And the women look funny too.

Since my employer states that medical issues are the second leading cause of workmen's compensation claims, I expect that the minute I'm eligible for health insurance, I won't have a job. Sucks but we'll see. Type I Diabetes being my medical issue.

Health problems=die sooner.

Insurance is just a fraction of your check. Lose weight and you save the company a little bit of money. Die, and you save the whole thing!

All those skinny people are going to hang around until they're 90-100 years old, and make us build nursing homes for them, and so on... chew up more food...

All I'm saying is, thin people are killing the planet.

When I was in the military we started each day doing exercise. If you were being paid, would anyone want to do this?

It makes sense for an employer to bring in a yoga instructor once or twice a week, or any other kind of exercise/play instructor.

Where I work, we used to spend our afternoon breaks playing an informal game involving paddles and rubber balls. We'd have a circle of 8-15 people knocking a ball back and forth, and having a really good time, too.

That activity was quashed after some games became "too long" in the eyes of one of our managers. It was a shame - morale plummeted after that. There were other contributing factors to the morale drop, but the death of paddleball added to it.

…being forced into it in a work setting could be very stressful indeed,
especially if people are being evaluated on their "fitness" and subject
to firing for being insufficiently "fit".

we tried this ... optional activity, after work, not paid for it, on company property in an otherwise unused space...

stupid fucking fundies complained that since yoga was a "religion" it could not be done ... and the management caved in immediately

Crap... another flame war. :smoke:

sure... always comes around to that, lately...

Afterall, there is clearly NOTHING more important than smoker's rights...:eyes:

Can you go from being obese to a healthy weight in one day?

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Even if you were successful on the first try (and few are), it still takes your body at least five years to rid itself of both the polluntants AND the addiction.

You don't know much about smoking, do you?

It was mostly out of boredom. When I left the Army I just stopped smoking. I had a couple relapses when I drank, but that was more out of habit rather than craving.

My parents smoked for decades, and then one day both quit without ever smoking again.

:thumbsup:

:thumbsup:

:applause:

And there's a similar thought pattern underlying them.

Overweight workers have more health problems and cost more - So let's single "them" out and make "them" pay more for health care and be monitored and penalized if "they" don't "get better."

Smokers have more health problems and cost more - So let's single "them" out and make "them" pay more for health care and be monitored and penalized if "they" don't "get better."

Older people have more health problems and cost more - So let's single "them" out and make "them" pay more for health care and be monitored and penalized if "they" don't "get better." Oh wait - we all get older, don't we?

Isolate groups as us and them, make you believe you're part of "us," however us is defied at that moment and that you are being asked to pay more than you should to subsidize "them." Be afraid, be very afraid of "those people" taking "your" scarce medical resources. Follow that emotional argument with a seemingly well reasoned argument that providing two tier or HSA or some other variant of divided and divisive health care insurance/coverage is the answer.

I am sick of it. And I think Americans want and desire a better solution.

We need a new Jonathon Swift to create a new "Modest Proposal" that will show this group of stories for what they are, an attempt to further fragment and divide us and keep us from going in the direction we need of providing universal, single payer health care to all and helping all to become healthier. Maybe Michael Moore will do that in his new film. I certainly hope so. And John Conyers is working tirelessly, as ever,to change the direction of the debate, look at the real issues here and propose the rational solution to this with HR 676. I, for, one, applaud him and support him in this.

>We need a new Jonathon Swift to create a new "Modest Proposal" that will show this group of stories for what they are,<

I'd love to write that essay, but there are so many others who are much more talented.

If I may, though? Perhaps it's best to just dispense with the overweight. Are they even human? After all, they're not as attractive as the rest of us. It's offensive to even look at them. Why should we be forced to?

Imagine how much money will be saved, how many lives will improve, how much better our society would be, if we didn't have to deal with a bunch of fat, lazy slobs.

:sarcasm:
Julie

And glad to see that other people get it.
Maybe we should write it together :-)

At my office most of us are endurance athletes. We either run marathons or compete in triathlons. Virtually all of us are in very good physical condition. It takes hard work and dedication to stay in good physical condition as you age.

We have very a low claims history; yet when we purchase insurance we get put into a pool of people who are not as physically fit. As a result, the insurance company makes a lot of money off of our premiums.

Why should the insurance company get to include us in a pool that is not reprsentative of our claims history?

I am not trying to start a flame war on this issue; I am genuinely interested in your analysis.

When it comes to driver's insurance? That never seemed fair either.

>Why should the insurance company get to include us in a pool that is not reprsentative of our claims history?<

I'm not sure what you want me to say to this, besides the fact that not everyone chooses to be an endurance athlete. Does this make us lesser people as a result?

When insurance companies discriminate against people on the basis of weight or any other preexisting conditions, it makes sure that others aren't insured at all. Is it their fault that they got cancer or were born with a hereditary condition?

Julie

versus a choice to be more fit. Certainly a lifestyle choice like fitness doesn't make someone more or less of a person regardless of which side of that decision they sit on. Nevertheless, it seems like basic economics that if we offer incentives to people to make the choices they control to be more fit society as a whole will benefit.

It seems to me that if you make a choice to be more fit and as a result your claims are lower, then you should be able to reap the benefits of that in insurance cost. It also seems like that if people were offered those types of savings these days when insurance costs are skyrocketing, it would encourage more people to be fit in their lifestyles, utimately driving down health care costs across the board. If insurance costs and healthcare costs go down,more people should have access to healthcare.

Given the potential rewards both societally and individually from a healthier lifestyle, I would argue that we should welcome employers offering fitness programs and encouraging their employees to become more fit rather than complaining about it as if they were somehow looking to make people into pariahs.

Sometimes the truth hurts, but it is true a high calorie, low exercise lifestyle is very bad for people and it leads to all manner of health problems.

>Certainly a lifestyle choice like fitness doesn't make someone more or less of a person regardless of which side of that decision they sit on.<

I call bullshit. Those who make it clear they believe they are more fit than the rest of us go out of their way to let us all know we don't measure up on a daily basis. Please don't make me trot out links from previous discussions on this forum supporting my facts. This has nothing to do with insurance premiums. If the fat started exercising and eating the way some here deem correct overnight, there would be some other issue that the holier-than-thou could not wait to pounce on.

>Sometimes the truth hurts, but it is true a high calorie, low exercise lifestyle is very bad for people and it leads to all manner of health problems.<

You weren't "looking for a flame war"? Well, buddy, you just got one.

Let's talk about the painful truth, shall we?

People come in all shapes and sizes. They also choose which lifestyle they'd like (or believe they can sustain, due to a variety of factors.) Of course, we all know that the endurance athlete lifestyle is the only acceptable one, isn't it? The painful truth: Anyone who is not as fit is just a fat, lazy slob that consumes more calories than they should be and should be shamed into what YOU think is appropriate or right.

Disease strikes everyone -- fat or thin.

I've read the "health" argument over and over and over and over in threads exactly like these. I have to thank the woman that finally came out and admitted the truth -- it has nothing to do with "health". It's all about appearance.

Julie

I already said that choosing to exercise does not make a person more virtuous than others. I know lots of people who exercise regularly but lack traits that I admire in others who do not exercise. It has nothing to do with someone's worth as a person. If you want to reduce any discussion of the real need in this country to encourage people to be more healthy to the presumption that "it is all about appearance" so be it. There is no point in us discussing this anymore.

It encourages the divisions into the have and have-nots and feeds off all of us in the process.

If we want to talk bloated, fat and unhealthy practices, the health insurance companies fit all those categories and function like huge leeches draining our society.

I want them out of the equation.

And I think we need to focus on this from a social rather than individualistic perspective.

I don't have children, but I do not begrudge funding schools and programs for children because I believe it creates a better society and we all benefit. It is part of my duty as a citizen.

I don't drive but I don't begrudge funding roads and highways for the same reason.

I feel the same way about health care.

I think it's wonderful that all of the people at your office are currently in good health and appreciate the effort it took you to get and stay that way. But I think we take the wrong direction when we accept the categories and subcategories that the insurance companies put us in and accept that health care is something we should approach from an individualistic or small pool stance. It's all part of buying into the moral hazard myth underlying our current system.

Here's a great article about that if you're interested:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829fa_fact
The Moral-Hazard Myth: The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.

I completely support universal healthcare. It should be a fundamental right to see a doctor when you are sick in this country.

Unfortunately, we have to work within a broken system and it doesn't look like it is going to change any time soon. The current system is driven by economics and not by any notion of the fundamental rights of humans. In the current system, it seems like using economics to bring down costs and make healthcare more widely available is advisable.

Through it we have seen that we agree about the fundamental right of humans to health care and that is powerful. Realizing that is the 1st step toward effecting the changes we need to make in the system to take it to the place it should be.

I understand the pragmatism of placing bandages on the broken system, but I think it's important to look beyond this and actually work to cure the break instead of just patching it. I think we're closer to this than we've been before, which is part of why there's been an increase in attempts to get us to look away from the bigger picture. The fear is being promoted to divide us precisely because the health insurance companies are afraid we're finally uniting to demad a better system.

Do you only hire runners or does everybody who comes to work there take it up after they start working for the company?
Is running used as a "team-building" activity?

What sort of office is it?

A lot of us ran together and then decided to start our own law firm. As we have added employees other people have come in and many of them start to run as well. It is part of our office culture.

Dancing is very good exercise.

Divide and conquer is as old as the hills.

One way of course would be better preventive healthcare.

afford healthier foods and have time to exercise.

If people didn't have 30 minutes, how many posts would there be on DU? I know I spend at least 30 minutes a day on DU that could be used for more exercise.

Exercise also reduces stress.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

more free time and decent wages would improve the population's general health. You disagree with that?

And by the way, people with decent standards of living don't have to choose between making a few posts on a message board and taking a walk around the block. A person should have time to live their life.

I really don't understand what the problem is. I'm a grad student....I work MORE hours than most people with jobs, and make less money than them, and I STILL find the time and money to work-out and excercise at least every second day (and sometimes more).

Its about education. Its about teaching people and giving them an incentive to hit a gym. I don't think it would be a bad idea to give employees an hour or so a day to excercise (i.e. you either excercies, or you keep working). Our car culture doesn't help either...it makes me sick that so many people I know use their cars to drive a freakin block to the grocery market.

Time and money won't solve anything...we have to be more aggressive with this problem.

One time I was with a British visitor while visiting a strip mall here. When I went to get into the car to move to another store he thought I was kidding. Looking back on it now, it did seem a little crazy. Now I always park way out and walk in to the stores.

Cheers

Many of us developed a lifelong aversion to gyms in "Phys Ed" class --
We learned that gyms are where unathletic people go to be humiliated.
A lot of people are put off of exercise for life by the experience.

There is a prevailing notion that exercise must be utterly dull and boring
(and preferably done in a "gym") unless it is a competitive sport.

Is it any wonder that a lot of people don't exercise at all?

The only thing that saved me from couch-potatodom was music.
Music made for dancing. Music to make you dance.
The music of the Grateful Dead. Raves. Psytrance.
Music all night long. Music all weekend.

Ride the Music

AndyTiedye

in this study?

Here's the abstract:

Background Obese individuals have increased morbidity and use of health services. Less is known about the effect of obesity on workers' compensation. The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between body mass index (BMI) (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) and number and types of workers' compensation claims, associated costs, and lost workdays.

Methods Retrospective cohort study. Participants included 11 728 health care and university employees (34 858 full-time equivalents ) with at least 1 health risk appraisal between January 1, 1997, and December 31, 2004.

The main outcome measures were stratified rates of workers' compensation claims, associated costs, and lost workdays, calculated by BMI, sex, age, race/ethnicity, smoking status, employment duration, and occupational group.

The body part affected, nature of the illness or injury, and cause of the illness or injury were also investigated. Multivariate Poisson regression models examined the effects of BMI, controlling for demographic and work-related variables.

Results There was a clear linear relationship between BMI and rate of claims.

Employees in obesity class III (BMI ≥40) had 11.65 claims per 100 FTEs, while recommended-weight employees had 5.80; the effect on lost workdays (183.63 vs 14.19 lost workdays per 100 FTEs), medical claims costs ($51 091 vs $7503 per 100 FTEs), and indemnity claims costs ($59 178 vs $5396 per 100 FTEs) was even stronger.

The claims most strongly affected by BMI were related to the following: lower extremity, wrist or hand, and back (body part affected); pain or inflammation, sprain or strain, and contusion or bruise (nature of the illness or injury); and falls or slips, lifting, and exertion (cause of the illness or injury). The combination of obesity and high-risk occupation was particularly detrimental.

Conclusions Maintaining healthy weight not only is important to workers but should also be a high priority for their employers given the strong effect of BMI on workers' injuries.

Complementing general interventions to make all workplaces safer, work-based programs targeting healthy eating and physical activity should be developed and evaluated.
-------------

The complete study is here: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/167/8/766

Nothing too surprising.

:eyes:


Beware the confound:



http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/167/8/766


Thing is, the authors give us no real reason to attribute the higher workers' compensation costs of high-BMI employees to anything other than the nature of the work that higher-BMI employees were relatively more likely than lower-BMI employees to be doing.

Of course, they don't let that, or their lip sevice in behalf of "caution" in interpretation, get in the way of rushing straight into their "health"-promoting and cost-shifting recommendations -- which are apparently the real point of the study.

But taking a look around, I would guess most people with a high BMI are carrying too much fat rather than too much muscle.

Cheers

... because when the CDC study of the NHANES data came out in 2005, various commentators tried to explain away the findings by arguing that the "overweight" and "mildly obese" sectors of the population might just be carrying a lot of muscle.


:D



(Briefly, the CDC study -- by Flegal et al -- reviewed decades worth of data from the National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey. They found that along with underweight and severe obesity, the recommended "healthy" weight range was associated with higher mortality relative to overweight and mild obesity. As you'd imagine, that did not go down well to say the least.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070424/ap_on_he_me/diet_obesity_costs_6

The findings were based on eight years of data from 11,728 people employed by Duke and its health system.

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

"...emphasizing caution in the interpretation of the bivariate relationships."


That's a quote from the study itself -- including that choice little bit informing us that they actually chose to leave out the data on that particular point.




Given that, the fact that people in the riskier jobs were heavier on average sure seems important. Interesting that they chose to exclude the relevant data. There's this huge confounding vaiable, and they explicitly refused to account for it. Wonder why they did that?




:rofl:

LOL! What's the matter: did they accidentally prove that smoking cigarettes reduces workman's comp claims? Yeah, weird shit like that can happen when you overdesign a study in hopes of reaching a pre-decided conclusion.


Okay, bottom line: the study brings us two astounding revelations: people who work at physically demanding, lower-status jobs are generally heavier than people who work at less-physically-demanding, higher-status jobs; aaaand you're more likely to get injured if your job is physically demanding than if you spend your days shuffling papers. Thank you, scientists. You may collect your Nobels at the door.


:eyes:



It's sad what passes for groundbreaking research...

minus the ROFL smiley

with justifications, since most people gain weight with age.

Young fat people - I bet they aren't so costly.

I know plenty of thin people who've had orthopedic surgeries.

We have had a number of people getting injured doing heavy lifting, which is required for the majority of production positions. The supervisers told the people doing the hiring to hire big people in hopes that they were less likely to get injured lifting 50-55 pounds over their heads and pushing pallets of the bags. Luckily for those people they got hired before anyone read the article.

When in some corporate Murka establishments --

There are the junk food laden vending machines, the expectation of working 'round the clock...

Cafeterias selling lousy excuses for offering called food

And to top it all off, there has to be some jerk who schedules a meeting around the fricking lunch hour.

And I think its the exception rather than the rule to find an exercise facility in the office or factory.

There are ways to overcome it all but when work-life balance in Murka is not balanced, we see obesity as a result.

I am literally forced to attend luncheon meetings time after time. If I don't go, I'm labeled anti-social or not a team player. Once someone told me...well, just go and only eat the cantaloupe. I replied, "well, if I could do THAT, I wouldn't have a weight problem in the first place." It's like expecting an alcoholic to go to meetings in bars time after time.

Couple the above with personal birthday celebrations with cake and goodies virtually every week on every floor. Some of us have asked the co. to do a monthly birthday celebration for all who have b'days that month, to no avail.

Add to that the goodies that people bring and leave sitting out all over the place. I literally cannot walk in any direction w/o passing junk food.

But my co. has started doing a few things...encouraging walking during lunch, and changed out the less healthy foods in the vending machines with healthier foods (but they're still junk foods...those breakfast bars? Hey, guys, they're MAINLY SUGAR!)

... and I was probably their CHEAPEST employee in terms of health care costs. Seriously. Except for annual or biannual exams, a few teeth cleanings and a new pair of glasses every couple of years, they rarely had to spend a dime on me.

So, what seems intuitively true is not necessarily true in practice.

Like, 20 pounds? 100 pounds?
What kind of work? All kinds of work?
Across all ages?

Hmmmmm.........