Body Corporate

By Adrian McCaw

There is a shift in international corporate thinking that dictates a healthy lifestyle and fit staff offer massive financial gains.

People are notoriously inept at taking responsibility for their actions, or, when it comes to taking care of their health, their inaction. Once unhealthy, they are quick to blame everyone but themselves for their plight. One just has to think of the lawsuits against McDonald's to see where this train of thought is going. The fact that they serve unhealthy food that has questionable nutritional value does not make them responsible for the fact that any given person has vitamin and mineral deficiencies when they eat there every meal time. The film Supersize Me was a great comment on what junk food can do to your bodily functions and should be made mandatory viewing at schools across the country.

                                           

The burden of heart disease, obesity and ill health is carried, however, by all of us. Yes, you and I are the ones paying for the extra slice of cheese and extra large fries. Not indirectly either. Taxes are raised to fund state healthcare systems. These systems are driven to breaking point by the strain placed upon them by the willfully unhealthy. I say wilfully unhealthy purposely. I take nothing away from the patients that need the system due to a genuine and unavoidable illness or injury. But to have our taxes raised because of lazy, gluttonous members of our society irks me just a little.

In the UK there is now talk of reducing National Health contributions for the members of society that place a lesser burden upon it. The people that exercise regularly and maintain a healthy lifestyle are to be financially rewarded. This concept has been in practice in South Africa for some time.

Discovery started it all with their Vitality link to Virgin Active. By becoming a member of Vitality, the participant has reduced rates on Virgin Active membership dues. Since the launch of the programme in 1997, Discovery Health claims to have helped 1.2 million people lead a healthier life. I know one person who can be taken off of that total. He simply goes to the gym to swipe his card in order to gain the benefit, and then decamps to the nearest bar to further his real interest, the bottom of the next glass. An expensive way of fooling people into believing you are an active individual.

Discovery is by no means the only company in on the act. There is a shift in international corporate thinking that dictates a healthy lifestyle and fit staff offer massive financial gains. Not only do the employees take fewer sick days, but when they are off sick they recover quicker. Pacific Bell in the USA saves $7million a year on this alone. By far the greatest benefit of a corporate health and fitness programme is the gain in productivity. Fit employees have better morale and interact more effectively with co-workers. That energy slump after lunch is minimized when people are fit and make healthy food choices. Swedish investigators found that mental performance was significantly better in physically fit workers than in non-fit workers. Fit workers committed 27% fewer errors on tasks involving concentration and short term memory, as compared with the performance of non-fit workers.

But the direct benefit is not only apparent in the workplace. These workers that are fitter and healthier are more likely to make a lifestyle change in the home as well. A better home life equates to happier workers, once again placing less strain on the support systems. Think of it as a social responsibility issue rather than providing free gym memberships for staff. Virgin Active has a corporate rate that should outweigh the cost of having employees taking sick leave.

The issue of responsibility is one that will never be adequately answered. I am of the belief that each individual has a social responsibility to behave in a moral and responsible manner. I know that I have flown in the face of that belief many a time. As South Africans we are notoriously lawless. I am not talking about major crime issues; even though those are always on the front pages, but how many of us see the Arrive Alive campaign and pooh-pooh it? The fact of the matter is that cheating on your taxes, speeding, drunk driving, fiddling your insurance claim and murder are all against the law. Yet we condone the speeding and tax fraud as a matter of course. If we take the same attitude to other legal issues, our lives are bound to become unbelievably complicated. The same could be said for our health. We all know the cost of health care, the state of our governmental health ministry and how we could improve it, yet we shirk the responsibility. We expect a first rate service, quite rightly, at our state hospitals, yet we are not prepared to take precautions that would reduce our reliance on the system in the first place. People are gorging on fast food and drinking to excess, but when their health suffers, it is the state that is blamed, not their own bad choices.

Corporate companies are assisting with healthier canteen catering, on-site gymnasiums or subsidised fees, participation in fitness events and the like, but is it ultimately their responsibility? Does the health insurer have to coerce their members into a healthier lifestyle, or should it be a state led issue? The state obviously has a responsibility to its citizens to provide safe, clean and maintained public facilities where they can exercise without the threat of meeting a violent death, but that opens a can of worms we shall not delve into in the context of this article. By the same token, there is an element of social responsibility from the employer, regardless of size, that says we should all offer some form of lifestyle coaching in order to gain productivity and motivation from our staff members. We cannot ignore the fact that there has been, and currently is, a massive educational divide amongst our population groups that needs to be addressed at every level.

But ultimately, the responsibility lies with the individual. The benefit goes far beyond a contribution to the company or state coffers by being that little bit healthier. The contribution to the family unit, the mental and physical wellbeing of the individual and, by extension, the health of the country is for the most part immeasurable, but it exists. All of us remember our heyday as school athletes fondly. Why not remember an entire lifetime with equal fondness? All it takes is a little effort and the rewards are offered not only to the individual, but all those that they encounter as well.