Thanksgiving may be one of our favorite holidays, but it sure does nothing to help anyone trying to lose weight or stay on a diet. This year, your iPhone or Blackberry may be to the rescue (or, just may be the bearer of bad news). Lots of calorie-counter apps can help you (and your employees) keep on track with eating right.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, MobileHealthNews.com has a run-down of the top apps. Here's what they say:

In the coming years these calorie tracking applications will become far more user friendly by being coupled with wireless peel-and-stick sensors that automatically count a person’s calorie intake. Companies like Philometron are working on those sensors right now — until then we have to manually enter or look up our food’s calories, which makes tracking a chore.

A chore, yes, but way easier than any online method or paper and pen. Some of these apps were designed for managing diabetes or keeping up with a specific diet plan--all good stuff.

These are just a few of the countless mobile apps putting health and fitness info in your employees' hands. This is going to be a fun, fun space to watch as more and more wellness companies and health plans get in the game of mobile apps, making tracking health and wellness easier and more fun.

As for me, I think I'll start using these apps after Thanksgiving. 

Editor's Note - Jennifer Benz is founder and chief strategist at Benz Communications, a boutique consulting firm that focuses on employee benefits communication. You can reach her at jen@benzcommunications.com or via Twitter @jenbenz.

Two food and health partnerships really got under my skin this past month.
 
First, the American Academy of Family Physicians’ sponsorship deal with Coke for the AAFP’s consumer-  
facing website, familydoctor.org, where Coke will underwrite content development on beverages and sweeteners. This deal is the first for AAFP’s new Consumer Alliance, a corporate partnership that—and I’m quoting from the AAFP’s press release here— “allows corporate partners like The Coca-Cola Company to work with the AAFP to educate consumers about the role their products can play in a healthy, active lifestyle.”
 
Is it me, or do these two seem like strange bedfellows? This is the same organization that published a study linking soda consumption to unhealthy weight gain and, possibly, to diabetes, right? Who in an article, titled “Assessment, Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Obesity,” outlined these recommendations to their physicians counseling young patients and their parents:

· Drink less 100-percent fruit juice. While fruit juice contains many important nutrients, it is also high in calories. Drinking too much fruit juice may contribute to weight gain.

· Drinking too many sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda or juice drinks, can contribute to weight gain. For example, drinking one soda each day adds enough extra calories to result in a 10-pound weight gain each year.

· Water is the most important nutrient. Pack water instead of juice boxes for lunches, sports or travel.

Maybe this alliance wouldn’t be so galling if it didn’t follow right on the heels of the beverage industry’s sharp attack on a potential soda tax and the launch of the Smart Choices Program™. The program’s simple. Companies pay up to $100,000 to display the Smart Choices seal of approval. Their products are given a nifty green check mark to signify they’re healthy choices and are identified on the Smart Choices website. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low- and nonfat dairy are all included. So are full-fat mayonnaise, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Lunchables Chicken Dunks, and Fruit Roll-Ups Crazy Pix.
 
The problem is that the program’s too simple. It’s not a “smart,” “smarter,” “smartest” food labeling system. There’s no path—from Froot Loops to fruit and low-fat yogurt, for example—to help consumers make increasingly better choices. Buyers, like my kids or your employees, can now walk into the grocery store and—with a straight, validated face—tell themselves (or their parents) that they’re making a “smart” choice and go on their merry way.  
 
Look, Lucky Charms aren’t the devil. Neither are soda and fruit juice. My family’s the oddity in our group of no-dessert or dessert-once-a-week friends. We have dessert twice a day, and I don’t mean fruit. We also tip back a can of soda now and again. I also recognize that my disgust is preemptive. Nobody knows how this new alliance will play out.
 
It may go the way of the Smart Choices Program. The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, the American Diabetes Association, the American Dietetic Association, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest—all original board members—have either dropped off or asked that their organizations be removed from the board, stating that individuals, not the institutions, are involved. Just last week, the Connecticut Attorney General announced he’s investigating Smart Choices, calling it “overly simplistic, inaccurate and ultimately misleading.”
 
But on the face of it, these deals and others like them make it increasingly difficult for consumers to make sound decisions and to know where to turn for reliable, unbiased information. They smack of trading a pound of flesh for our trust…and a ton of cash.

UPDATE: As of Friday 10/23, “Smart Choices,” a food industry labeling program that launched this summer and was backed by a bunch of food-business heavyweights will “voluntarily postpone active operations,” according to this statement. 
 
Editors Note: Fran Melmed is the owner of context communication consulting llc, an employee communication consulting firm. She blogs at free-range communication on communication, HR, and health and wellness. You can find her on Twitter @femelmed. (image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coca-cola_art_gallery)

Do you tweet?  If not, you ought to think about it.  Chances are a lot of your employees are either tweeting or are following tweets of friends, newsgroups, or other organizations.  You yourself may be following any number of firms that work in the HR consulting space: @towersperrin, @hewittnews, @watsonwyatt, etc.  And if you’re reading this blog, you probably follow the tweets of various bloggers, as well.  Why, then, would you not consider tweeting to your employees about their benefits?

Think about it.  Annual Enrollment is just around the corner for most employers.  And setting up a Twitter account couldn’t be simpler.  All you need is a name and an e-mail address, both of which I’ll assume you have or can scrounge up.  Then, in your more formal communications to employees, simply add somewhere, “Follow me on Twitter @inserttwitternamehere”.  That’s it.  Interested employees will subscribe, and those who aren’t won’t.  The initial investment outlay is almost nothing.

I know what you’re thinking: “How could I communicate, in 140 characters or less, enough information about our benefits to be of value to employees?”  Well -- you could use it as a mechanism to point employees to articles posted to your intranet about benefits changes for the new plan year, remind employees about that start and end of Annual Enrollment, and direct employees to resources they can use to make intelligent benefits decisions.

This is going to be a hard sell for some people.  Even as social media has grown so explosively over the past several years, Twitter seems to be the medium that’s received the least attention.  Facebook and MySpace are easy to explain to not so tech savvy people.  They’re simple applications that allow you to connect with and follow the lives of friends, colleagues, bands, movie stars, etc.  Your grandmother may even have a Facebook account.

Twitter, on the other hand, generally requires some explanation.  When you tell your vice president of compensation and benefits that you think tweeting during this year’s Annual Enrollment could help drive active participation and facilitate effective benefits communication, you may be met with a blank stare and/or glazed eyes.  S/he is going to ask the same question you were thinking earlier: “How could I communicate in 140 characters or less enough information about our benefits to be of value to employees?”  The real investment here may be the time spent garnering support from management to implement Twitter as a communication mechanism.

Full disclosure -- I’m not an attorney.  There may be legal implications to using Twitter to communicate with employees in your organization regarding benefits.  You should consult with your own legal counsel before doing so.  You may also be opening yourself up to employee responses to your tweets with how they really feel about your company or its benefits offering.  These responses can (and likely will) be read by people outside of your organization.  There are two ways to view this.  On one hand, it’s good to get candid feedback from employees.  On the other, most of us would rather not air our dirty laundry for the viewing public.  You’ll have to weigh the risks and benefits of this before taking any action.  If you ultimately decide that tweeting leaves your organization too exposed, you may want to consider private microblogging networks like Yammer.  I think the primary issue with these private networks will be adoption by employees, since they won’t already have accounts setup.

Can Twitter replace your formal benefits communications materials?  Of course not.  It’s impossible to explain all that needs to be understood about your company’s benefits in 140 characters or less.  And I suspect employees would be less than receptive to receiving multiple 140 character tweets in consecutive order that, when combined, communicate a cohesive message.  But using it as a mechanism to point employees in the direction of more formally developed communications, sending reminders about key dates during Annual Enrollment, and guiding employees to resources that help them make educated decisions about their benefits would be useful.

So let’s hear it.  Have you used Twitter or other forms of social media to communicate to employees about their benefits?  What were your biggest challenges in rolling it out?

And, if you’re interested, follow me on Twitter @g_dagley.

Editor's Note - Greg Dagley is a Benefits Consultant for a large multinational employer in Houston, TX. While his company has employees all over the globe, his job keeps him focused on US benefits and spending a lot of his time managing external vendors.  Is there any doubt his Excel skills are more advanced than yours?

Shawn Tully provides some interesting proposals to reform health care in this country in an article published by Fortune Magazine on-line this week.  His proposals involve taking a market based approach to reform.  Here are some highlights:

• Eliminate the tax break provided to employees who get health care through their employer.
• Encourage employers to stop offering health coverage altogether and, instead, increase employee wages by an amount equal to what they pay on behalf of employees for that coverage.
• Give tax breaks directly to consumers to purchase health insurance on their own.
• Promote high deductible health plans (or other consumer focused coverage) for consumers on the open market so that consumers of health care begin acting just like that: consumers.
• Deregulate the “three big inflators” of health care costs: the standard benefits package, community rating, and guaranteed issue.
• Permit consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines.

In theory, I agree with Tully.  Take the money employers pay for health insurance and give it directly to employees.  Give tax breaks directly to consumers to purchase health insurance on their own.  Encourage (or incentivize) people to purchase only the health insurance they need and use the remainder of what they don’t spend on insurance itself to cover other health care expenses.  And implement reforms that encourage competition and innovation in a free market.

However, I see some issues with this approach.  First, I have little confidence that all employers will raise employees’ salaries by an amount equal to what they’re paying for health insurance.  Some employers will reduce total compensation to employees by raising salaries by an amount less than what they’re paying for health coverage hoping those employees will simply be appreciative for the nominal salary increase.  That said, one can argue that the labor market will correct this in the long term.  But there will be some period of time during which employees’ overall compensation may be materially reduced. 

Second, employees don’t know how to buy health insurance on their own.  For sixty years, employers in the US have spoon-fed health insurance to 170 million Americans, who very rarely read their Summary Plan Descriptions.  Pushing this responsibility to employees will, no doubt, result in analysis paralysis on the part of many consumers.  In a worst case scenario, consumers will purchase coverage that is far too rich or far too poor, simply because they don’t know what they’re buying.  And I don’t think that consumers will earmark what they don’t spend on a Cadillac health care policy for other health care expenses.  Prior to the current economic situation, Americans showed that, under normal circumstances, they will spend everything they bring in and then some.  The personal savings rate in the US was negative 1% in 2006 and negative 0.4% in 2005.

I am supportive of market based solutions to the health care dilemma this country is currently facing.  I worry that relying on employers to replace health care benefits with additional compensation will not work out in favor of employees (at least in the near term).  I’m not sure that consumers are ready for the responsibility involved in purchasing their own health insurance.  (Why do you think universal national health care has the support it does?)  I also think that Tully’s proposals work fine in a bubble.  But there are too many interests groups (including the insurance industry, unions, employers, local, state, and federal government, etc.) that will throw up innumerable roadblocks to any and all of these proposals.  The health care industry makes up one sixth of our national GDP.  Navigating the political landscape to implement such market based solutions would be almost as difficult as, well, navigating the political landscape to implement a public option to compete with private health insurers.