"A Workplace Wellness Program that Works"
How do you wipe out the nation’s heart disease epidemic?
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest,
one of the best approaches for preventing
the disease in the first place is the “CHIP program,”
which tells people to eat more whole plant foods,
and less meat, dairy, eggs, and processed junk.
It is considered to be a premier lifestyle
intervention targeting chronic disease
that has been offered for more than 25 years,
through which more than 50,000 individuals have gone.
And, most CHIP classes are run by volunteers,
sourced primarily through the Seventh-Day Adventist Church,
who had an interest in positively influencing
the health of their local community.
Why the Adventists?
Well, they have a health philosophy
built around a biblical notion
that the human body should be treated as a temple,
and many of the participants of the program
are Adventists too.
Is that why the program works so well—
because they just have faith?
You don’t know...
until you put it to the test.
The Influence of Religious Affiliation
on Responsiveness to the Complete Health Improvement Program.
They looked at 7,000 participants.
Even though Adventists make up
less than 1% of the U.S. population,
about 1 in 5 CHIP-goers
were in the Church.
How did they do compared to the non-believers?
Substantial reductions in selected risk factors
were achieved for both Adventists and non-Adventists,
but some of the reductions were actually
greater among the non-Adventists, non-SDA.
This indicates that Seventh-Day Adventists
do not have a monopoly on good health.
Middle class, educated individuals
also disproportionally make up CHIP classes.
Would it work as well in poverty-stricken populations?
We didn’t know…
until now.
How about trying to reduce chronic disease
risk factors among individuals living
in rural Appalachia, one of the
poorest parts of the country?
Conventional wisdom has been that
you need to have some financial “skin in the game”
to really commit to lifestyle change programs.
So, if offered for free to impoverished communities,
maybe the results wouldn’t be as good,
but the overall clinical changes were similar
to those found in other 4-week CHIP classes
throughout the US,
suggesting CHIP may benefit across
socioeconomic lines and independent of payment source.
So, why don’t employers offer it
free to employees to save on healthcare costs?
CHIP is described as achieving some of the most impressive
outcomes published in the medical literature,
clinical benefits and cost- effectiveness as well.
Lee Memorial, a healthcare network
in Florida offered it to some of
their employees as a pilot program.
Sadly, healthcare workers can be
as unhealthy as everyone else.
They reported an average 17-pound weight loss,
20-point drop in LDL cholesterol,
and blood pressure normalization in most participants.
They invested about $38,000
to make the program happen,
but then saved, just in that next year,
$70,000 in reduced healthcare costs,
because they became so much healthier,
for a financial return on investment
of like 1.8 times what they put in.
But, there hadn’t been an ROI study
published in a peer- reviewed medical literature…
until, Dexter Shurney stepped up
to the plate and published this
workplace study out of Vanderbilt.
Now, there was a high degree of skepticism
at the planning stage of the study
that active engagement could be realized
around a lifestyle program that had
as its main tenets exercise
and a plant-based diet.
Vanderbilt is, after all, in Tennessee,
smack dab in the middle of the stroke belt,
known for their Memphis ribs;
yet, they got on board enough to improve
their blood sugar control and cholesterol,
as well as positive changes
in self-reported health and well-being.
Health care costs were substantially reduced;
for example, nearly a quarter were able
to eliminate one or more of their medications,
and so, got about a 2-to-1 return
on investment within just 6 months,
providing evidence that just educating
a member population about the benefit
of a plant-based, whole foods diet
is feasible and can reduce
health care costs.
The largest workplace CHIP study
done to date involved 6 employee populations,
including, ironically, a drug company.
A mix of white collar and blue collar,
and check out what happened
to the worst off.
Those starting with blood pressures
up around 170 over 100 fell down
to around 140 over 85.
Those with the highest LDL cholesterol
dropped 60 points,
a 300-point drop in triglycerides,
a 46-point drop in fasting blood sugars.
Theoretically, someone coming in with
both high blood pressure and high cholesterol
might experience a 64 to 96% reduction
in overall risk of a heart attack,
our number 1 killer.
For the cost of a Humvee, Michael Jacobson
from CSPI figured, any town
could have a CHIP program of its own.
And, for the cost of a submarine or a farm subsidy,
the entire country could get a CHIP on its shoulder.