’Tis the Season for a Slice of Wellness Training

In order to get the nutrition they need every day to stay healthy, employees must develop and maintain healthy eating habits. Here’s a video that takes a light-hearted approach toward providing facts about nutrition and the important employee wellness topic of having healthy eating habits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv66ItR_F24&feature=player_embedded

I’m sure you’ve heard that good nutrition is important to good health. But how?

Well, good nutrition helps you in many important ways. For example, eating healthy food helps to prevent diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure and maintain a healthy weight.

In order to get the nutrition you need every day to stay healthy, you must develop and maintain healthy eating habits. Unfortunately, many Americans have very unhealthy eating habits.

Healthy eating means eating three nutritious meals a day, consuming reasonable portion sizes, limiting intake of fat, sugar, and salt, snacking sensibly between meals, avoiding fad diets, and balancing calorie intake with physical activity.

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Proper nutrition depends on a well-balanced diet that includes carbohydrates, fiber, protein, and some unsaturated fat. Carbohydrates give your body the energy it needs to function effectively all day. Carbohydrates are found in fruits, vegetables, bread, cereal, pasta, rice, and milk and milk products. In fact, 45 percent to 65 percent of your daily calorie intake should come from carbohydrates. You also need about 14 grams of dietary fiber for every 1,000 calories you eat. Protein is another essential nutrient, and you should get 10 percent to 35 percent of daily calories from proteins.

Most Americans eat more protein than they really need to stay healthy. Protein is found in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, nuts, milk and milk products, grains, and some vegetables and fruits.

Some protein-rich foods such as meat are also high in fat and cholesterol. To keep healthy, you should consume less than 10 percent of your daily calorie intake as fat. Most of your fat intake should be unsaturated, as opposed to saturated, fat. Saturated fat is found in foods such as high-fat cheese, high-fat meat, butter, and ice cream.

Nuts, vegetable oil, and fish are good sources of poly- and monounsaturated fats.

Health experts also say you should consume less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Cholesterol is a fatty substance found in animal-based foods such as meat, eggs, and whole milk.

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Sugar is found naturally in foods such as fruits, vegetables, and milk and milk products. Some foods include added sugar, and these foods are less nutritious than foods containing only natural sugar. To keep healthy, try to avoid added sugar, which provides no nutritional value and also contributes to tooth decay.

Also, remember that fluids, vitamins, and minerals are part of good nutrition, too. You need about eight glasses of water or other low-sugar fluids a day.

Finally, even though you’ve got a lot of great choices here in your fridge, I’m sure you eat out sometimes. When you do, remember to make healthy choices. Restaurant or takeout food can be high in fat, sugar, and salt, and low in required nutrients. When you eat food prepared outside your home, try to pick lower-fat foods, choose smaller portions, go broiled or baked instead of fried, order a vegetables or salad, and skip dessert.

For more information on nutrition, visit www.blr.com. Here you’ll find lots of information on wellness. BLR® specializes in employee training, so be sure to check out all of their employee wellness training resources as well as other training topics.

Why It Matters

• Giving your employees nutrition information can help keep them healthy and on the job.
• Healthy employees will cut down on your sick leave costs and your healthcare insurance expenses.
• Healthy employees who are eating the right balance of nutritious foods are more likely to be more productive as well.
• The bottom line is that a healthy amount of wellness training can provide a healthy return on investment for your organization.