Nutrition Support for Your Employees: 'A Nice to Have' or 'Have to Have'

Nutrition Support for Your Employees: 'A Nice to Have' or 'Have to Have'

July 25, 2024

Dr Fiona Geaney, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Food Choice

Around 40% of all deaths in Ireland are attributable to preventable risk factors. Poor diet is the biggest risk factor for chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, surpassing the combined effects of tobacco, alcohol and physical inactivity. To improve our dietary patterns, we need to move away from an excess consumption of ultra processed foods such as takeaway meals to eating more sustainable foods including wholegrains, plant proteins, fruit and vegetables!

As many employees can spend up to two-thirds of their waking hours at work, employers are in a unique position to positively influence their employees' dietary behaviours. Group and individual level nutrition education and professional support can empower employees to make long-term dietary improvements. Healthier employees are more likely to be productive, satisfied with their job and innovative at work demonstrating that a workplace culture that promotes health benefits the employee and the business!

Food Choice are a team of 10 registered nutritionists and dietitians who partner with local and global organisations to develop tailored nutritional health programmes to support employees to eat well to improve their health. As many employees are working hybrid, onsite or remote, employers are searching for pragmatic strategies to support their employees to improve their nutritional health.

Here are some of the effective strategies that our partner organisations have adopted this year:

1. Plan:
   • Developing a 'Healthy Eating Policy' for your organisation can help to set targets, identify responsibilities with a suitable monitoring and review process.
   
   • Prepare a Health & Wellbeing calendar including all pillars of health. Informed by your employees, identify a theme for each month. Include one or more nutrition events. For example, the theme for August might be 'Gut Health' with a 'Time for Tummies' workshop for onsite and remote employees.
   
   
2. Nutrition Training:
   • Research shows that employees with higher nutrition knowledge tend to have better diet quality.
   
   • Flexible online nutrition training that employees can engage with at a time that suits them, such as online nutrition programmes, virtual workshops, webinars both live and recorded and online cook-along sessions have been popular for hybrid, remote and employees who work shift!
   
   • In person small group workshops, live food demonstrations and masterclasses are a positive, fun and interactive learning experience!
   
   • Our most requested nutrition themes this year are Food and Mood, Gut Health, Heart Health, Immunity, Nutrition for Shiftwork and Eating Sustainably.
   
   
3. Nutrition Coaching:
   • Both online and in-person 1-2-1 nutrition coaching offers individual advice and can be suitable for employees that may not be comfortable attending group sessions.
   
   • Many of our partner organisations have engaged with individual nutrition coaching but in different ways.
   
   • We have several coaching services that include one or multiple sessions with a registered nutritionist or dietitian including our 'Nutritionist for A Day' and our two, four and 6-Week Food Choice Nutrition Programmes.
   
   • Our registered nutritionists and dietitians provide personal guidance and share practical behavioural change techniques.
   
   • Employees receive bespoke resources including individual nutrition reports, sample meal plans, easy to prepare recipes and useful food choice tips for example on portion size and caffeine.
   
   
4. Healthy Eating at Work:
   • Access to drinking water, increased availability of fruit & vegetables, healthier options that are lower in saturated fat, sugar and salt and menu labelling (calorie, traffic lights, allergens) can all help to improve the food offer and inform employees' food choice.
   
   • For hybrid or remote working, healthy vending, meal delivery or gift food vouchers are worth considering.

Your workplace culture will help you to identify the right strategies for your organisation, depending on factors including your employees' working location, work type, employees' preference, budget and available employee health screening data. With all health activities, it's important to monitor attendance, engagement, impact and to ask for employee feedback!

Take it step by step, build on where you are today and measure the impact along the way!

About Food Choice
Food Choice empower employees to improve their nutritional health using expert advice, and research lead programmes tailored for each organisation. The Food Choice team are workplace health advocates, thought leaders in public health nutrition and registered nutritionists and dietitians.

Dr Fiona Geaney is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Food Choice. Over the past 10 years, Dr Fiona Geaney has published leading workplace nutrition research from the School of Public Health, University College Cork. Dr Geaney holds a BSc in Nutritional Sciences, a Master of Public Health and PhD in Public Health Nutrition. Fiona is a Registered Nutritionist (Public Health) with the Association for Nutrition. Please visit our website for more information Food Choice at Work | Ireland's Leading Corporate Nutrition Consultancy | Employee wellbeing or contact [email protected].

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