Healthy eating is one of the pillars of health and wellbeing, and the workplace can often be the place where employees eat most of their food, making it an ideal setting for promoting healthy eating.
There are multiple reasons to promote healthy eating in your workplace and ensure your workplace environment is conducive to healthy eating choices. Poor nutrition is linked to chronic disease and illness, and lack of essential nutrients will hinder the body’s ability to flourish and heal which impacts on cognitive, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
An organisation’s greatest asset is their workforce. A workforce with decreased risks of disease and illness and enhanced cognitive, emotional, and physical abilities has the potential to lead to multiple benefits:
- Greater productivity, innovation, and creativity
- Greater motivation and problem-solving capacity
- Greater loyalty to the organisation
- Greater workplace cohesion and stronger team spirit
- Reduced absenteeism
- Reduced insurance costs
- Healthy, happy, and thriving workplace environment
Additionally, a commitment to the health of your employees will improve your public image and recruitment and retention opportunities.
Here are some quick resources to get you started:
Know Your Numbers
This resource from Healthy Ireland and the HSE encourages you to reflect on your current lifestyle behaviours. A change to how you live your life can reduce your chances of developing diabetes, cancer, heart disease and lung disease and other …
Happy Heart Healthy Eating Award
This is a unique health promotion programme created by the Irish Heart Foundation in the mid-1990s. Through the award programme, catering facilities in healthcare services are assisted and supported to adopt healthier cooking practices and provide healthier food choices without …
INDI
The Irish Nutrition & Dietetic Institute (INDI) is the professional organisation for dietitians in Ireland representing almost 800 Dietitians and Student Dietitians nationwide. The INDI sets national standards for undergraduate dietetic programmes, dietetic placements, and graduate degree practice programmes.
Healthy Weight Campaign
Healthy Ireland’s Healthy Weight campaign is one in a series of national measures to help you manage your weight. The aim of the campaign is to support your health by sharing information about behaviours that can affect your weight.
Healthy Food for Life
Healthy Ireland’s Food Pyramid guide to every day food choices for adults, teenagers and children aged five and over. It offers tips on how to plan and prepare healthy meals and how to achieve a healthy weight.
Healthy Meeting Guidelines
This poster summarises Healthy Ireland’s guidelines to help you prepare for meetings and offers practical suggestions on providing healthy food options and physical activity.
While these resources are helpful to get you started, it’s very important to carefully plan your workplace wellbeing activities. Research shows that all activities that target the individual employee, should be coupled with activities at the level of the organisation. In other words, you should always take measures to create a supportive organisational environment alongside lifestyle-focussed supports for your employees. We’ve included detailed advice on how best to plan your activities at both these levels.
Organisation-level Activities
The “bedrock” of the CIPD Well-being Pyramid is culture, leadership and people management. These are the best ways to ensure you’re creating a solid foundation to your workplace well-being efforts
Individual-level Activities
Your wellbeing initiatives at the individual level will likely focus on raising awareness and/or building skills to manage this wellbeing area.
Other Healthy Eating Resources
In this section you can find additional resources to help you with your healthy eating programmes
Connect with the HSE and community support organisations for infographics and other resources in our Community Links section.