Here’s the study:
Only 10 people, and only 24 weeks, but they lost a total of about 400 pounds (I think this was for the 12 people who initially started) and “cost savings across the cohort over 24 weeks were calculated and projected to annualized savings of USD 45,171.70”.
Gave them CGMs and Keto Mojos.
The study itself seems reasonably good, beside being a such a small number, so call it a good start. I’ve got to say, though, that it brings back creepy feelings.
The place I worked for my last nearly 20 years did an employee health program starting around 2005, IIRC. They were slowly moving in the direction of requiring some sort of BMI metrics and the other side of that is requiring annual physicals, weigh-ins and lab work. There were statements, always denied, of mandatory diets and mandatory exercise periods. It hadn’t happened quite like a concentration camp when I retired at the end of 2015, but I remember getting a mandatory weigh in when I was just low carb, weighing 30-ish pounds more than I do now, and getting a stern talking to.
It seems like this study is reasonable, with CGMs and Keto Mojos, but it always makes me think there are going to be companies who think that’s too radical and they need to follow the USDA guidelines, the ones pretty much behind the whole obesity epidemic.
If they had said, “you’ve got a problem” and tried to help in some way other than mandatory “eat less move more” sessions, I’d feel better about it.
This is a slippery slope.
The study was informative but the implications on the work force could become totalitarian.
Companies could start trying to force their employees to conform to a standard of health that is a requirement of employment.
And if they push the USDA guidelines and SAD, they’ll make people more sick. Which nutritional guidelines are emphasized and encouraged really matters.
I think it would be smarter for companies to offer resources, help, and encouragement for various diets allowing employees a choice, but never requirements or mandates for one specifically.
They also have to be careful to not alienate alternate perspectives and create a self-policing environment where mandates are done by the employees themselves through social shaming and bullying and such. It is a slippery slope indeed, even if they do utilize the healthiest diets out there. Freedom matters.
I agree that companies tend to be too militant for some of this. For example, the whole “you must return to work!” craze. For my job, for instance, while I go to work, 9 out of 10 days, I sit in my office and never talk to anyone. We never have meetings. We never discuss anything. We just write. Why am I at work? And driving to/from work is a waste of time that I could put toward work.
You have to remember, though, that there are companies doing this for multiple years. (I can’t remember the name of the company tasked with keto for years – they have a bunch of studies of keto in the workplace spanning multiple years. On the tip of my tongue…but can’t remember it.)
Anyway, if it’s offered as an option, I think it’s a great idea. And I don’t understand why CGMs have been over the counter in Europe for about a decade now, but not in the US. Why not? And why are continuous ketone meters over the counter overseas but not here? Why is the US always the last to get this stuff?
Every tool, such as a keto diet run by an organization, can be good or bad. If it’s run correctly, without shaming people or “requiring” them to do it, I think it’s useful.
Well how else could we have the most expensive but least effective healthcare in the world, if we didn’t make sure to withhold any sort of preventative or layman-operated protocol? 
Are you perhaps thinking of the work Dr. Alfred Pennington did at du Pont in the years after World War II? He helped many executives and labourers lose significant amounts of fat by putting them on a high-fat, low-carb diet. He published a number of case studies plus other articles about his experiences. I am currently working my way through “Treatment of obesity with calorically unrestricted diets” (Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 1, no. 5, 1953).
IT is well known that weight reduction requires a limitation of the caloric intake to a level below that of the caloric expenditure. This limitation is usually effected by conscious restraint of the appetite but there appears to be reason for believing that it can also be accomplished by physiological forces which, being brought to bear upon the appetite, regulate it so that weight is lost without the necessity for enforcing caloric restriction. In normal individuals, the appetite appears to be limited by regulatory mechanisms; and though these are disturbed in the obese, they continue to operate at the higher level of body weight. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that, if the cause of the disturbance can be removed, these still-intact mechanisms should adjust the caloric intake to output at a normal weight level.
There it is: the ketogenic diet in a nutshell.
Just a bit of light reading, heh? Gosh I love this forum. I’ve found my peeps. This is why I always look forward to your replies Paul. You don’t mess around but educate yourself. Most people don’t bother to read the tough stuff and would rather parrot what some friend said, what a doctor told them, or what a post on social media or main stream news claimed, and they treat it like the holy grail of facts and truth. But this forum’s gang is in the trenches. I love it.
When I was facing taking care of three kids each with multiple disabilities, I was so scared of not understanding what I must as a mother and having to rely solely on various doctors, who never agreed with each other. I was so frustrated and lost and they were making it worse. So I had a year where I was working my way through the entire DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and it was regularly on my end table in the living room. Very, very thick book. LOL I remember guests thinking I was completely out of my mind because I wasn’t a doctor myself, and I had no business acquiring and reading such books. It’s like people forget we all have the capacity to understand anything we take the time to study - if we want to bad enough.
Q1: Who is this quote from? The JOCN you’re reading?
Q2: How does one get hold of what you’re reading? Where could I read??
My mother was a professor of psychiatric nursing, and it always seemed the DSM’s got thicker and thicker with each new edition. 
Did you ever watch the movie Lorenzo’s Oil? It shows what a determined person with no scientific training can do, with proper study, to advance science. The story of how the Charlie Foundation got founded is similar. Not to mention Dave Feldman and Amber O’Hearn, who are more recent examples of what citizen science can achieve.
Yes, it’s the first paragraph of Pennington’s article. The PDF of this study is available for download, but I don’t remember where I got it from. If you send me your e-mail address in a private message, I can e-mail it to you.
I’ve not seen that but thanks for the recommendation. I will look for it to watch. Sounds like my kind of movie. I love true stories of amazing people that defy odds or presumptions.