Nutrition and its effect on Productivity at the Workplace

Abstract

This document explores the relationship between nutrition and productivity at the workplace and, to a lesser extent, lifestyle. Nutrition is essential for the body to sustain itself and enable its systems to work productively. As important as productivity is, it can be affected by things such as immunity, energy balance, sleep, and more which can be significantly assisted by nutrition. The sections of wellness points described below can affect levels of productivity. The discussion takes place in this document on how diet can affect each point. The topics are Travel and Vacation and how to fight illness before leaving on vacation, Combating stress with nutrition, concentration, and focus on nutrition, anxiety, fighting disease, and the immune system, energy highs and lows, sleep, food at work, and meetings, and emotional eating.

Methods used to gather information were conducted by searching various databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Google, and various medical internet sites. Included in the methods were people of the general healthy working population, mainly in the United States, and exclusions were those with terminal illnesses. The results for each point are in the document, and the discussion allows for the best actions to help productivity thrive at the workplace and personally.

Keywords:productivity and nutrition, workplace productivity, emotional eating

Nutrition and its Effect on Productivity

People have specific dietary needs, and diet provides for these needs. Healthy food provides a well-balanced diet for the body. Inadequate nutrition can harm the body in many ways, like a weaker immune system, more access to becoming ill, loss of mental and physical development, and decreased productivity.

Appropriate nutrition is needed to maintain proper wellness and physical endurance and keep illness at bay. People with suitable dietary needs met by consuming whole foods, whole grains, leaner meat, and fish have a stronger immune system to fight disease and fewer diseases caused by a poor diet. Foods include fresh fruit and vegetables, organic meats, and wild fish versus farmed. The Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) contains high amounts of saturated fats, hydrogenated oils, refined carbohydrates, and highly processed foods (Leonard, 2013).

Eating poorly and having a sedentary and stressful lifestyle can create an environment for illness and obesity. Numerous diseases relate to this. These include high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart, stroke, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, and certain cancers (Leonard, 2013). Food choices create an outcome that can lead to being ill or healthy and impacts productivity. Making nutritional choices can also result in more robust well-being and self­esteem, higher skills to cope with stress, better overall health, lower health costs, and enhanced satisfaction and productivity at work.

Poor employee health and related productivity losses cost U.S. employers $576 billion per year, including workers' compensation, disability, and group health program expenses, according to research in 2012 (Ceniceros, 2012). Many things can affect workplace productivity. The following are examined and shown how each can impact a person's health and productivity.

These are:

- Dealing with work travel, vacation
- Stress, Concentration, and Focus
- Anxiety
- Flu season
- Energy highs and lows throughout the day
- Sleep and its effects on productivity
- Fitting in proper nutrition during the day at work
- Meetings and nutrition
- Emotional eating and how these tie into all aspects of the body, mind, and spiritual health

As many as 85% of U.S. employers are interested in services to increase employee productivity, minimize absences and improve the health of their employees (5 Factors, 2016). Some estimates show that 18 to 20 million Americans aged 19-64 are not working due to health reasons (5 Factors, 2016). There were roughly 69 million workers who had missing days due to illness last year, for 407 million days of lost time at work (5 Factors, 2016). At the same time, about 40% of U.S. workers are fatigued, which causes people to perform at less than half capacity for health reasons (5 Factors, 2016). Stress leads to employee disengagement, which also negatively affects productivity.

For U.S. employers, fatigue bears estimated costs of more than $136 billion per year in health-related lost productivity, $101 billion more than for workers without fatigue (5 Factors, 2016). Eighty-four percent of the costs were related to decreased performance at work rather than absences. (5 Factors, 2016).

One of the biggest challenges for employees is presenteeism (being present at work but not performing optimally) (Holwegner, 2013). Like many corporations, time management was considered a systems and technology option to improve. After further research, it is found that health-related factors are more significant issues than investing in business resources or time management training (Holwegner, 2013). The bottom line will be severely affected if employees are unproductive and not at work (Ceniceros, 2012).

Addressing the factors behind lower productivity is beneficial. These factors can be about nutrition, mindset, personal problems, attitude, and illness and how diet and lifestyle tie into all these. This paper will discuss how making healthy diet choices can positively affect productivity.

Methods

This document's purpose is to examine how various lifestyle factors could impact productivity in the workplace. Searches for data are from databases such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Google, and ProQuest. Peer-reviewed and full articles are the main contributors. A review of generally employed populations makes up the data for this study. The scope of research will be conducted using current or past written research and previous client experience. Peer-reviewed articles will be significant, and the presentation will occur using PowerPoint. Keywords include and are not limited to: "Nutrition and productivity," "Nutrition and wellness," "Lifestyle and Productivity," "Stress and productivity," "Sleep and productivity," "Obesity and productivity," and "Emotional eating and productivity."

This project will gather data that will discuss how nutrition, lifestyle, and productivity at work relate. The main component of the data is derived from the American working population, and exclusions are those who are terminally ill. This type of research is Quantitative because the study will seek to explain the causes of the concern at hand through objective measurement and quantitative analysis or statistics (Jefferies, 1999). Because qualitative research is more concerned with understanding what is happening as viewed by the participants, it is different from quantitative (Jefferies, 1999). This research is also qualitative from the emotional eating perspective. It ties into the notion of the determinants of food and lifestyle that individuals choose: biological, economic, physical, social, psychological, and attitudes.

Results

Travel and Vacation - Combating illness before leaving on vacation

The body continuously produces stress hormones, such as adrenaline, to help fight infection. Once the body relaxes, the levels decrease and make the body susceptible to illness (Jones, 2014). Evidence shows that eating well before vacation, catching up on sleep, and taking specific vitamins or probiotic supplements could benefit the immune system (Jones, 2014).

Hydration.Drinking at least one liter of water every five hours is a recommendation from researchers from St. John's University in Taipei (Brown, 2014). Dehydration on flights occurs because people do not drink enough water, and the cabin microclimate increases the dehydration rate (Brown, 2014).

Melatonin.The medical consensus on the effects of melatonin, the hormone that controls sleeping and waking cycles on jet lag, is mixed (Brown, 2014). Studies have found that it does help overcome jet lag. Various studies have monitored the effects of melatonin on long-haul flight passengers and found that those who took the hormone improved sooner than the placebo group (Brown, 2014).

Immunity and travel.Building up the immune system before a long flight is significant.

Sugar suppresses the immune system, whereas fruit and vegetables are immune-boosting (Brown, 2014). Intensely colored fruit and vegetables, such as dark green, red, blue, and black, and not overcooked, are beneficial. Also, airplane food is always very salty, which encourages water retention in the body. Potassium-rich vegetables will combat this, as well as vegetables such as celery, carrots, cucumbers, and some organic almonds, as they contain magnesium (Brown, 2014). Astaxanthin supplementing is beneficial for its antioxidant properties (Bowman, 2014). It can improve blood flow, which is essential when sitting on a plane, and it can lower oxidative stress, which benefits the immune system (Bowman, 2014). Studies show it has the highest antioxidant activity against free radicals (Bowman, 2014).

Stress and travel.Stress plays a significant role in air travel. Besides a healthy diet, restorative sleep, regular exercise, and adding essential nutritional supplements to the routine are helpful (Kroner, 2011). One mineral that helps to combat stress is magnesium. It is one of the first nutrients to be depleted during stress (Kroner, 2011). The adrenal glands depend on magnesium, as do over 300 different enzyme reactions in the body (Kroner, 2011). Taking 100mg of magnesium taurate in the morning of the flight is recommended, and another 100mg just before the flight (Kroner, 2011).

Stress

Stress has many effects on the body, leading to poor workplace productivity. Repeated acute anxiety and persistent chronic stress can contribute to inflammation in the circulatory system, specifically in the coronary arteries, which ties stress to a heart attack (Stress effects, 2016).

Stress, in biological terms, refers to the aftereffects of a person failing to respond adequately to an event that has occurred in their life, whether physical or emotional (Ritchie, n.d.). Stress happens in three stages. The first is an initial state of alarm which produces an adrenaline rush in the person's body (Ritchie, n.d.). The second stage is a short-term resistance mechanism that the body sets up to cope with the problem, and the final stage is a state of exhaustion in the body which can lead to adrenal fatigue (Ritchie, n.d.).

With the sudden onset of stress, the muscles tense up all at once and then release their tension when the pressure passes (Stress effects, 2016). Chronic stress causes the muscles in the body to be constantly guarded. When muscles are tense for extended periods, this may trigger other body reactions and even promote related stress disorders (Stress effects, 2016). A tension­type headache and migraine headache refer to muscle tension in the area of the shoulders, neck, and head which can cause a very unproductive workday (Stress effects, 2016).

One of the main issues with stress is that it can create unhealthy eating habits, which applies to people who are always on the go and lead busy lifestyles (Ritchie, n.d.). People here often endure significant stress and have no time to fit in balanced nutrition around their busy schedules (Ritchie, n.d.). Stress makes the body crave foods high in fats and sugars, and this concern with eating will inflict a greater stress on the body and additional problems that threaten physical and mental health (Ritchie, n.d.).

A common reaction when a person becomes stressed is a sudden urge to eat food. These foods consumed in this situation are mainly convenience foods considered a quick fix to nullify stress and worsen the problem (Ritchie, n.d.). The most crucial issue is the harm that stress can inflict from inadequate nutrition. If there are bad practices in food management while under stress, there is a high risk of severely damaging the body (Ritchie, n.d.).

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