Employees are the backbone of any organization, and most companies have started to recognize that investing in their most valuable assets gives them a leg up on their competition. Corporate wellness programs are springing up all over the country, while corporate giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook carve the path and set the standard for slashing healthcare costs and boosting productivity through health and wellness initiatives. A key component of these wellness workshops? Educating on nutrition and promoting healthy eating habits.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 75% of employers’ healthcare costs and productivity losses are related to employee lifestyle choices. Nutrition is a huge part of that. Poor nutrition and less-than-ideal eating habits can be a huge expense for companies today. With the ever-increasing rates of obesity and disease come skyrocketing healthcare costs, greater absenteeism, and lower productivity. That means profits are swirling down the drain—unnecessarily! All it takes is a little education and some effort spent teaching, inspiring, and investing in the nutritional health of the people who are the very foundation of your business to turn this spiral around.

But it’s not all about the cash either—employee health makes everything better. When a corporate wellness nutrition program is implemented, it promotes camaraderie and collaboration, boosts morale, and improves workplace engagement and retention. Not too shabby right? The key to corporate nutrition services is to incorporate it as part of a larger workplace wellness campaign that takes a holistic approach to health and wellness. Not every business that offers corporate nutrition programs is created equally. You don’t need someone coming in spouting off the average, run-of-the-mill nutrition information that we’ve all been getting hit over the head with for years. By now, we all know fast food and processed food is bad. We all know what’s a carbohydrate, a protein, and a fat, and we all know to fill our plate with plenty of greens. A better corporate nutrition program is innovative and cutting-edge, and it incorporates research about the newest nutrition science, including ketogenic diets, intermittent fasting, and HIIT training to burn fat and increase mental clarity.

Corporate wellness promotes camaraderie and collaboration, boosts morale, and improves workplace engagement and retention.

At Urban Wellness Clinic, our corporate nutrition program does exactly this: our nutrition topics dig deeper, so you can be sure you’re getting cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute nutrition tips that can be immediately implemented for the best results. Our lunch and learn sessions are engaging, smart, and inspirational. We get everyone to walk away with new information and new ways to think about the food they’re putting into their body.

Nutrition Lunch and Learn

We teach how to use food as medicine and how to utilize food to beat that 2 p.m. slump. We help employees tap into the power of whole foods as one of our expert nutritionists leads them through the principles of “food as medicine.” They learn to get healthier, toned, and more focused—all by shifting what they eat. We cover how the food a person eats not only affects their appearance and weight, but has an immense impact on mood, attention span, ability to focus, and tolerance for sitting in one place for long periods of time. Your employees’ consumption of nutritious food, or lack thereof, determines whether they remain sharp and attentive or tired and hazy. We go over how foods high in antioxidants maintain brain health and alertness as well as how choosing healthy fats and proteins and colorful whole foods while avoiding processed anything sets up the body and mind for success.

One on One Nutrition Assessments

For a deeper dive, we also offer one-on-one nutrition assessments, in which we review a food diary with each employee. Through the food diary evaluations we strategize ways to replace not-so-good food choices with optimal ones. We contact participating employees one week before the individual assessments and provide them with instructions on how to keep and maintain their food diary. On the day of the assessments we sit down privately with each employee, review their eating habits, and discuss how they can optimize their food intake to increase their energy and improve their overall health. We take into account each individual’s body type, medical history, and specific concerns to most accurately identify the optimal foods and eating habits for them. Employees love the personalized attention of our one-on-one nutrition assessments, and we leave everyone with tools to live better, stronger, and in optimal health.

Food is a complicated topic. We aim to cut through all the noise—those conflicting magazine covers and all the new diet fads and products constantly being shamelessly promoted on social media and TV—to give solid, straightforward information that will truly resonate to improve health, vitality, and wellbeing.

Here are some sample topics we cover:  

• Breaking the myths we’ve been taught. We provide scientifically backed information on the proper proportions of a meal based on the latest research from the nation’s leading nutrition and health experts. Variation is key for optimum health—the body needs a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods to thrive. Whole foods have the most nutritional value, and any diet should be primarily made up of whole foods.
• Falling in love with fats. We cut through the misinformation we’ve been given, disproving the idea that eating fats leads to heart disease—and teach employees what actually causes heart disease and inflammation in the body: sugar.
• Ketogenic diet. We teach the health benefits of nutrition’s hottest topic—a high fat, moderate protein, and low carb diet. We share the sources of healthy fats: avocados, salmon, nuts, coconut oil, and more, and we cover the breakthrough science behind this diet while touching on some of the newest movements in ketogenesis. We also give balanced information by describing some of the potential downsides of this eating style.
• Gut health. We stress the importance of gut health for a strong immune system and a happy body, including how a leaky gut can cause autoimmune conditions, eczema, hair loss, fatigue, digestive concerns and more.
• The importance of fungi. We explain the importance of fungi for a healthy gut environment. We discuss mycobiome vs. microbiome and what it means for our food choices.
• Love your adrenals. We teach the importance of the adrenal glands, the signs of adrenal fatigue, and how to eat to preserve the adrenals and (if necessary) begin to heal them for optimum health.
• Mind your mitochondria. We explain what mitochondrial health means for physical performance, energy, and wellbeing. We also speak to the causes of mitochondrial dysfunction.
• Pay attention to your pH. We teach employees how to eat for the proper pH. Most of the body needs slight alkalinity for optimum health and function. We explore foods that are acidic and ones that are alkaline and how to get the correct balance for the body.
• Detoxification. We believe in a functional medicine approach to health and from that perspective, detoxification is vital to getting a good baseline read of health. Toxins from the environment, in our beauty and household products, and in our foods create a heavy toxic load. To support a detox of these harmful chemicals, we need to effectively eliminate toxins by making healthy lifestyle changes and adopting good nutrition habits.
• Experiment with fasting. We cover different things to keep in mind with intermittent fasting for both men and women, fasting with a ketogenic diet, and fasting to help alleviate chronic disease.
• Epigenetics. We teach the importance of understanding the effect of outside influences on gene expression. Diet literally directly impacts genetics: diet and lifestyle choices influence 80% of our genetic expression, so eating right has significant benefits on a very deep level. We have the opportunity to change our genetic story.

These are just a sample of topics we like to dive into in our lunch and learn sessions. Of course, if there are specific areas a client wants us to cover, we customize our approach to suit those needs. Plus, nutrition is just one of four areas of corporate wellness we specialize in. We also offer ergonomic assessments, workplace yoga (on the mat or in the chair), and chair massage for stress and tension relief. We believe that a full body-and-mind approach to health and wellness is key for maximum success and optimum health and performance.

So, whether your own employees are sitting long hours or racing from meeting to meeting, nutrition education through workplace nutrition workshops can change their lives. Get in touch at hello@urbanwellnessclinic if you’d like to know more about our corporate nutrition services. You could see improved energy levels, efficient performance, and a physically and mentally healthier workforce. And honestly, with those skyrocketing healthcare costs, you can’t afford not to do the best for your employees’ health.

Best in health,

Dr. Emily Kiberd