| In: Obesity
The High Cost of Workplace Obesity
Not surprisingly, obesity in the workplace has measurable costs and consequences for businesses:
Obese workers filed twice the number of workers’ compensation claims, had seven times higher medical costs from those claims and lost 13 times more days of work from work injury or illness than other workers, according to a Duke University Medical Center study of the health records of more than 11,000 Duke University employees. The results were published in April’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
The average medical claims costs per 100 employees were $51,019 for the obese and just $7,503 for the nonobese.