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Below you will find a concise summary of our conversation with Johan Albrecht. The full episode can be listened to via Spotify & Apple Podcasts.
About Johan Albrecht
Johan Albrecht is a professor at the Faculty of Economics at Ghent University and author of the book ‘Invest in a Healthy Lifestyle. Towards an Activating Prevention Policy’. His book covers, among other things, chronic diseases and a healthier lifestyle as the solution to this problem. It also discusses an efficient, sustainable, and activating prevention system. New initiatives such as an individual health budget are also addressed.
One of the reasons for writing the book was his interest as an economist in the challenges of prevention policy. The fact that we all know a healthy lifestyle can yield great benefits, yet it is not applied in practice.
Why do many people fail to succeed in adopting a healthy lifestyle?
On one hand, a large part of the population is still not really open to adopting a healthy lifestyle. On the other hand, another part of the population simply cannot start due to various barriers.
Studies have shown that 30 to 40% of the Belgian population is health illiterate. This means that these people have difficulty properly evaluating their own health status. Moreover, they cannot communicate well about their health problems with healthcare providers and have trouble correctly following their treatment.
Our current prevention policy is quite passive, meaning people have to seek out information themselves and act on it independently. This is not evident for a large part of the population.
If you want to involve these people in a prevention policy, you need to actively support them. For example, by organizing group sessions with concrete actions and advice. But sometimes even that is not enough, and individual coaching must be considered, which naturally comes with a significant price tag.
On top of that, a large part of the population is skeptical about claims that a healthy lifestyle is important. These people always see health issues as medical issues, so the solution for them must also be medical, such as medication.
Encouraging healthy break moments and the role of the government
Is it not the government's role to support initiatives like JustBite, which want to tackle this important societal challenge?
In the US, there has long been an incentive for companies to ensure their employees are as healthy as possible. In Belgium, this is not the case at all. Our health insurance is a national system, and companies have no say. When employees are sick, the medical bill is for the taxpayer, not the companies. Of course, companies prefer their employees not to be sick often or for long periods, as this is not conducive to continuity. This is often the incentive for companies to guide their people towards a better lifestyle themselves.
With the aging population we face and the fact that the number of long-term sick people will likely increase significantly in the coming years, it is important that companies at least ask themselves how they can protect and guide their human capital.
This can already be done with a few basic steps to steer employees towards a healthier lifestyle. Examples include a canteen policy offering only healthy food (free of charge), creating quiet spaces for effective breaks, investing in a healthy breakfast for employees, offering healthy snacks, ...
The government can certainly support this, but the real initiative and motivation should come from the companies. JustBite can assist companies by offering healthy snacks to their employees, thus lowering the barrier for people to try something new and achieve behavioral change.
Individual health budget
An individual health budget can help guide people who are motivated to cure or improve chronic diseases through a healthier lifestyle but do not know how to start.
Chronic diseases have a very high cost. Such an individual health budget obviously costs money. But if we can guide a portion of the chronically ill towards a healthier lifestyle in a tailored way, the future bill for medical treatments, medication, etc., will naturally decrease.
In the long term, we should apply this more broadly and also guide people preventively towards a healthier lifestyle to help prevent chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. But it is important to first prioritize those who are already ill.
The network effect should not be underestimated here either. A large part of the population does not consider what they could achieve with a healthier lifestyle. As more people in their environment take action successfully, the chance increases that they themselves will also start (or want to start).
Prevention policy and the environment
It is clear that the less meat we eat, the better it is for our health. Especially processed meat products and red meat are limited as much as possible in a healthy lifestyle.
The more people follow this recommendation, the more the demand for meat decreases. This only benefits the planet because meat production is extremely environmentally taxing. Due to high water consumption but also CO2 emissions and nitrogen issues.
So adopting a healthy lifestyle can also have a significant positive effect on our environmental footprint.
Do we all have to become vegetarians or vegans? No, people who eat little meat are often much healthier and have a much lower ecological impact compared to heavy meat eaters.
So not only does our health benefit from lower meat consumption, but our planet benefits as well!
A pill as a last resort
People who are skeptical about a healthy lifestyle often lack the motivation to change their lifestyle. They reason that if they just take a pill, they can live to 80 years old. But they forget that they will not be able to enjoy a high quality of life.
The goal should not be to live as long as possible, but to live as long as possible with quality.
Medication can do a lot, and fortunately, we have come far medically. But you always sacrifice quality of life if you do not also address the underlying problems, such as obesity. Medication should actually be a last resort.
Conclusion
It is always interesting to occasionally reflect on your own lifestyle and ask yourself if certain things could be improved. The search for a healthy lifestyle never really ends, and this makes life exciting. Trying changes and discovering new things keeps us young.
So try to find what works for you. Change can be learned and embraced.