Dieting for dollars? More US workers are giving it a try

June 2, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

ATLANTA

How much money would it take to get you to lose serious weight? $100? $500?

Many employers are betting they can find your price. At least a third of U.S. companies offer financial incentives, or are planning to introduce them, to get their employees to lose weight or get healthier in other ways.

“There’s been an explosion of interest in this,” said Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives.

Take OhioHealth, a hospital chain whose work force is mostly overweight. The company last year embarked on a program that paid employees to wear pedometers and get paid for walking. The more they walk, the more they win — up to $500 a year.

Anecdotal success stories are everywhere. Half of the 9,000 employees at the chain’s five main hospitals signed up, more than $377,000 in rewards have already been paid out, and many workers tell of weight loss and a sudden need for slimmer clothes.

But will this kind of effort really put a permanent dent in America’s seemingly intractable obesity problem? Not likely.

Only about 15 to 20 U.S. studies have tried to evaluate the effect of financial incentives on weight loss. Most of those studies were small and didn’t look at whether such measures worked beyond a few months. None could make conclusions about how much money it takes to make a lasting difference for most people.

Perhaps the largest effort to date was an observational study by Cornell University. It looked at seven employer programs and the results were depressing: The average weight loss in most was little more than a pound.

Sure, there are grounds for optimism. Smaller experiments report some success. And other studies have shown promising results against tobacco. One study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by Volpp, found that cash rewards of a few hundred dollars nearly tripled quit-smoking rates.

One problem: “Food is more difficult than tobacco,” said Steven Kelder, an epidemiology professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health.

Health officials lament that more than two-thirds of American adults are overweight and one-third obese, and lecture on fat’s role in deaths from diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.

The problem has a huge economic impact, too, with obese workers costing U.S. private employers an estimated $45 billion or more annually in health- care costs and lost labor. That’s according to a report by the Conference Board, a research group focused on management and the marketplace.

Some experts remain fascinated by the idea of using economics to get people to eat better and exercise. Sales taxes have been used to drive up the cost of cigarettes and drive down smoking rates, and Brownell and others are pushing for similar taxes on soda.

Companies tend to be more interested in incentives than disincentives such as taxes. But the perks they attach to wellness programs come in a variety of forms and sizes.

The value of rewards can range from measly to thousands of dollars.

OhioHealth set the maximum reward for its step-counting program at $500. “It just sounded right to us. We thought that would be a big enough number to help people think twice,” said Lisa Meddock, OhioHealth’s benefits manager.