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Below you'll find the concise summary of our conversation with Johan Albrecht. You can listen to the full episode on 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 healthier lifestyle. Towards an activating prevention policy'. His book covers topics including chronic conditions and a healthier lifestyle as the solution to this problem. But also an efficient, sustainable and activating prevention system. New initiatives such as an individual health budget are also discussed.
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 healthier lifestyle can pay off enormously, yet this knowledge isn't put into practice.
Why do so many people fail to adopt a healthier lifestyle?
On one hand, a large part of the population still isn't really open to adopting a healthier lifestyle. On the other hand, another part of the population simply can't get started because of all kinds of barriers.
Studies have shown that 30 to 40% of the Belgian population has low health literacy. Concretely, this means these people struggle to properly assess their own health status. What's more, they have difficulty communicating about their health problems with healthcare providers and struggle to carry out their treatment correctly.
Our current prevention policy is rather passive, meaning people have to seek out information themselves and take action on their own. Which isn't exactly straightforward for a large part of the population.
If you want to bring these people along in a prevention policy, you need to support them actively. For example, by organising group sessions with concrete actions and advice. But sometimes even that isn't enough, and individual coaching is needed, which of course comes with a considerable price tag.
On top of that, a large part of the population is sceptical about claims that a healthier lifestyle matters. These people always see health issues as medical issues, so for them the solution also has to be medical, in the form of medication, for example.
Encouraging healthier breaks and the role of government
Isn't it the government's job to support initiatives like JustBite, which want to tackle this important societal challenge?
In the US, there's long been an incentive for companies to make sure their employees are as healthy as possible. In Belgium, that's not the case at all yet. Our health insurance is a national system, and companies themselves have no say in it. When employees are ill, the medical bill goes to the taxpayer, not to the companies. Of course, as a company you'd rather not have your employees sick often and for long periods, that's not good for continuity. That's often the incentive for companies to guide their people towards a better lifestyle themselves.
With the ageing population we're facing, and the fact that the number of long-term sick people will likely rise sharply in the coming years, it's important for companies to at least ask themselves how they can protect and support their human capital.
And this can start with just a few basic steps to nudge employees towards a healthier lifestyle. Examples include a canteen policy where only healthier food is offered (for free), creating quiet spaces for breaks that actually work, investing in a healthier breakfast for employees, offering healthier snacks, and more.
So the government can definitely support this, but the real initiative and motivation should come from companies themselves. JustBite can help companies with this by offering healthier snacks to their employees, lowering the barrier for people to discover something new and make real behavioural change.
Individual health budget
An individual health budget can help support people who are motivated to cure or improve chronic conditions through a healthier lifestyle, but don't know where to start.
Chronic conditions come with a very high price tag. Such an individual health budget obviously costs money too. But if we can support part of the chronically ill with tailored guidance towards a healthier lifestyle, the bill for medical treatments, medication, and so on will naturally go down in the future.
In the long run, we should apply this more broadly and also guide people preventively towards a healthier lifestyle, helping to prevent chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes. But it's important to first prioritise people who are already ill.
The network effect shouldn't be underestimated either. A large part of the population doesn't think about what they could achieve with a healthier lifestyle. As more and more people around them take action, and succeed, the more likely they are to want to get started themselves too.
Prevention policy and the environment
It's clear that the less meat we eat, the better it is for our health. Processed meat products and red meat in particular are kept to a minimum in a healthier lifestyle.
The more people follow this recommendation, the more demand for meat drops. Which is only good news for the planet, since meat production is enormously taxing on the environment. Due to high water consumption, but also because of CO2 emissions and the nitrogen issue.
So adopting a healthier lifestyle can also have a considerable positive effect on our environmental footprint.
Should we all become vegetarian or vegan then? No, people who eat little meat are often already much healthier and have a much lower ecological impact compared to big meat eaters.
So it's not just our health that benefits from lower meat consumption, our planet benefits too!
A pill as a last resort
People who are sceptical about a healthier lifestyle often lack the motivation to change their habits. They reason that if they just take a pill, they can still live to 80. But in doing so, they forget they won't get to enjoy a high quality of life.
The goal shouldn't be to live as long as possible, but to live as well as possible for as long as possible.
Medication can do a lot, and thankfully we've come so far medically. But you always lose out on quality of life if you don't also tackle the underlying problems, such as obesity, for example. Medication should really be a last resort.
Conclusion
It's always interesting to occasionally hold your own lifestyle up to the light and ask yourself whether certain things could be improved. The search for a healthier lifestyle never really ends, and that's what makes life interesting. Trying out changes and discovering new things keeps us young.
So try to find out what works for you. Change is something you can learn and embrace.