At Nabholz Construction Services, employees who don’t smoke and who keep their blood glucose, cholesterol, blood pressure and body fat at healthy levels can earn bonuses totaling up to $400 a year.
Last year, the company also started awarding “super incentives” - additional cash bonuses for employees who quit smoking or lose weight.
At a conference at the University of Arkansas System’s Winthrop Rockefeller Institute near Morrilton last week on reducing obesity in Arkansas, Arkansas Surgeon General Joe Thompson cited the Nabholz wellness program as one of a multitude of promising initiatives in the state helping overweight Arkansans shed pounds and improve their health.
Clay Gordon, Nabholz’s vice president and chief development officer, said the bonuses and other components of the company’s wellness program, which include paying the salaries of a fulltime physician’s assistant, personal trainer and dietitian, cost about $400,000 a year.
Meanwhile, the program has reduced the cost of covering the company’s 850 employees and their spouses under the company’s healthcare plan by about $1 million a year, for a net savings of about $600,000 annually, Gordon said.
“There’s absolutely no doubt that it’s changed a lot of our people’s lives for the good and likely saved a few,” Gordon said.
Public health officials, researchers and other conference participants recommended encouraging more employers to adopt wellness plans, Thompson said.
Other recommendations included doubling, to 20 percent, the percentage of mothers who breast-feed their children during the child’s first six months of life and educating mothers and doctors about the danger of mothers gaining too much weight during pregnancy.
Feeding a child too much formula could increase the risk of a child becoming obese, Thompson said, and “the evidence is pretty strong that if a woman gains too much weight … we can actually induce obesity even from an early start.”
Jeff LeMaster, a spokesman for the Rockefeller Institute, said recommendations from the conference, held Thursday and Friday, will be compiled into a report outlininga plan to reduce the state’s obesity rate.
With several state and federal measures to curb obesity already in place, tackling Arkansas’ weight problem will require the support of families, employers, city officials and others, Thompson said at the start of the conference.
“We’ve got to get it to where it’s tens of thousands of people having a more healthy lifestyle with a more balanced nutritional intake and physical burn-off if we’re going to avoid what I see as a pretty cataclysmic outcome for our friends and families,” Thompson said.
Nabholz started its wellness program about seven years ago, adding the cash bonuses about three years later, said Jayme Mayo, a physician assistant and director of the program.
As part of the program, employees have free access to the fitness centers, which were set up in nine of the company’s 11 offices and are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Employees also have free access to a health clinic at the company’s Conway headquarters.
The bonuses, Mayo said, are based on five health measures that drive the company’s insurance costs - cholesterol, blood glucose, body fat, blood pressure and tobacco use.
For each area in which an employee meets a health-related criterion, he can earn a bonus. Those who don’t meet the benchmarks, but show progress toward quitting smoking or losing weight, can also earn a cash reward.
Since the program started, the percentage of employees with high cholesterol has dropped from 42 percent to 17 percent, while the number diagnosed with diabetes for the first time has dropped from 44 in the first year to less than 10 per year in the past few years, Mayo said.
The number of employees who smoke and have high blood pressure have also dropped, she said.
Batesville Mayor Rick Elumbaugh, one of the participants at the conference last week, said improving the health of the workforce is a goal for his city, which has plans to build a $26 million recreation center and sports complex with money from a 1 percentage-point sales tax increase passed by the city’s voters last year.
The city has also been adding to its trail system with the help of grants fromthe Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department, he said.
“We want an economically vibrant community, and we also want a healthy community,” Elumbaugh said.
In a report released in August by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Arkansas ranked No. 3 in the number of adults who were considered obese in 2012 and was the only state in which the adult obesity rate increased that year.
The report, based on telephone surveys conducted by state health agencies and reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also ranked Arkansas No. 1 in the number of adults who reported being physically inactive, meaning they reported having not exercised within 30 days of being surveyed.
But Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Washington, D.C.,-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, said she considers Arkansas a leader in initiatives to address obesity.
Those efforts have included Act 1220 of 2003, signed by former Gov. Mike Huckabee, which removed vending machines from elementary schools, limited their contents in upper grades, set higher nutrition standards for cafeteria food, and required schools to measure and report students’ body mass indexes - a measure based on height and weight.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, sponsored by Arkansas’ former U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, required the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take additional steps to prevent the sale of high-calorie sports drinks and candy bars and to improve the nutritional value of food served in school cafeterias nationwide.
To promote healthier eating by adults, Wootan told conference participants that many states are considering policies promoting the sale of healthy foods in vending machines and cafeterias on state property and served at events there.
An Arkansas Department of Health policy, adopted in 2007, requires at least half the food and beverage items sold at Health Department events to be healthy and fruits and vegetables to be served every time food is offered.
That policy can serve as a model for other state agency policies, Health Department spokesman Kerry Krell said. She said the department is also working on a policy that would require at least half of the food items soldin vending machines on state property to be healthy.
Wootan said some states are also considering seeking waivers from federal rules that would allow them to prohibit food stamps from being used to buy sugary drinks, the consumption of which has been linked to obesity.
Arkansas could also discourage the consumption ofsoft drinks by increasing its soft drink tax, she said. The state currently charges a tax on wholesalers of about 2 cents per 12-ounce serving.
She said studies have shown that a 10 percent increase in the tax on soft drinks can reduce consumption by about 8 percent.
“That’s a pretty effective public health intervention,” she said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/16/2013