Being Heart Healthy at Work

Many employers, including Pinnacol Assurance, are working hard to help their employees adopt and maintain healthy (or healthier!) lifestyles. For as long as I have been with the company we've offered wellness classes, an on-site wellness center, and other incentives for employees to do something good for their health. I even have a company-provided health-coach/nurse who follows up with me on a quarterly basis. The challenge of course remains getting people to take advantage of and use these healthy options.

This morning on our "Industry News" section of our company intranet there was posted an excellent article: The Guide to Beating a Heart Attack written by Ron Winslow. At first I was inclined to skip over it as we see these types of articles all the time. For some reason though I opened the link and read what turned out to be one of the best articles I've seen.

The good news is that progress is being made. You probably already knew that heart disease and its consequences are largely preventable. Deaths from coronary heart disease in the U.S. have been cut by 75% during the past 40 years. Hospital admissions for heart attack among the elderly fell by nearly 25% in a five-year period during the last decade, a remarkable feat when many experts had expected the aging population to cause an increase in the problem.

The bad news is that nearly one million Americans will suffer a heart attack this year and cardiovascular disease remains the leading killer of both men and women. Particularly troubling are increasingly common reports of heart attacks among younger people, even those in their 20s and 30s.

What really struck me though, and what is most relevant to those of us who spend most of our days with our fanny glued to a chair, is a study from Australian researchers that found spending more than four hours a day in front of a computer or television was associated with a doubling of serious heart problems, even among people who exercised regularly. As one of the Doctors put it: for people who sit most of the day, their risk of a heart attack is about the same as smoking.

So what can you do? Perhaps you already work out before or after work and on weekends and here's this article saying that's not enough. The trick it seems is in part to simply keep moving throughout the day. When I do new employee orientation for folks joining our company I talk about all the healthy options we offer but now I'm going to spend a little more time talking about something as simple as getting up and out of your chair on a periodic basis. The article talks about getting up and walking around every thirty minutes or so and that the benefits from moving start as soon as you get up. For the more ambitious, walk up a flight of stairs and use the restroom or fill your water bottle on another floor. Take a break during the day and walk around your building. Feel the sun on your face and breathe the fresh air.  And don't forget to be....

Happy. The article wraps up with an interesting study by Wayne State University researchers who rated the smiles of 230 baseball players who played before 1950 based on pictures in the Baseball Register. Then they looked to see how long the players lived on average: No smile, age 73; partial smile, 75. Those with a full smile made it to 80.

The article also has many other heart-healthy suggestions so I'd recommend reading it. If you are like me, there's a lot of things each of us can do, some as simple as walking around, that really can make a difference and help us beat the odds of a heart attack.