How can healthy eating make us happier?

 Happiness can't be bought, but you can eat it for a piece. Employees who eat healthy food at work and take healthy snacks in between meals are more productive and energetic - in short, happier. But what then is the connection between job happiness and healthy eating at work?

Happiness hormones

Let's start at the beginning for a moment. Our brains are constantly communicating with all our cells through neurotransmitters. Every time we eat something, thanks to those neurotransmitters, a fine, happy feeling is created in our brains. When we eat fast sugars and carbohydrates, we briefly get that happy feeling, but this feeling ebbs away very quickly to make way for a dip and sometimes even a dejected feeling.

In contrast, when we eat whole, healthy foods with useful nutrients that make us feel satiated, it triggers the happy feeling for a longer period of time.

Therefore, it is important to choose the right nutrients that stimulate the production of these neurotransmitters or happiness hormones for a longer period of time. Some good examples are chickpeas, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, bananas and also whole grain rice.

Not only our brains play a big role in the link between healthy eating and (work) happiness. Our gut flora is also of undeniable importance. A happy belly is a happy you, so what we put in our mouths every day largely determines how happy and healthy we feel.

In our podcast with Rudy Proesmans, we already went into detail about the effect of fast sugars, the importance of healthy gut flora and the impact on our health.

What can you do as an employer to boost work happiness?

Work happiness is closely related to work health. Therefore, it is important to create a positive virtuous cycle by focusing on work happiness, healthy snacks and lunches, regular exercise and stress management.

Employers thus have an excellent opportunity to help their employees achieve optimal work happiness and give their employees' vitality a serious boost.

If only fatty, carbohydrate-rich snacks full of refined sugars can be found in the workplace, you will find unhappy, irritable, jaded and tired employees who struggle to concentrate.

However, when employees are encouraged and given the opportunity to consciously make healthy choices, work happiness is guaranteed to increase, resulting in higher productivity and lower absenteeism.

4 tips to encourage employees to choose healthy foods

1. Make healthy food and snacks readily available at work
Go beyond just making a fruit bowl available, take a hard look at the snack machine and stock it with healthy snacks. At JustBite, you can choose from a variety of snack boxes so that healthy snacking becomes as easy as "a walk in the park.

Also review lunch options and, if possible, adjust the company restaurant menu or partner with local vendors who offer healthy lunch options instead of yet another "unhealthy sandwich.

2. Facilitate healthy eating and snacking
Provide a pleasant space where employees can enjoy healthy food and have a mindful, conscious and relaxed lunch and break. Humans are social animals and eating is a social event. When employees eat together, they tend to eat slower, healthier and more mindfully, allowing them to feel satiated faster and really connect with each other. Such a mindful lunch break also helps them disconnect from work for a while, and moving to the lunch space already encourages them to get some exercise.

Furnishing this space doesn't have to take a big bite out of the budget; small adjustments often go a long way. Involve employees in the design so they feel like they are taking their health into their own hands.

  

3. Create awareness
Often employees eat unhealthily out of habit and because they are unaware of what is and is not healthy. Help set your employees on a positive path to healthy choices. You can't force your employees to choose healthy options, but you can steer them in the right direction through brochures, posters, workshops... JustBite helps through useful brochures, info sheets, Lunch & Learn workshops... to encourage this awareness so that healthy eating can become a habit.

4. Create a group feeling
Ask your employees to share their favorite healthy recipes and create a company cookbook with the most popular dishes. Organize a team building where healthy cooking is done together. Make healthy cookbooks available in the lunch area so employees can experiment together and exchange ideas among themselves. This way, healthy eating becomes a fun group activity and employees can motivate each other.

 

Healthy eating can thus play a very important role in employees' long-term job happiness. By investing in awareness about healthy snacking and making healthy food available to employees, as an employer you give your employees the opportunity to become and remain healthy, happy, productive and happy employees. And happy employees make for happy employers.