Lost Lunch Hour: A New Population Health Issue?

If you’re like me the idea of “lunch hour” is limited to occasional business lunches, and more often sandwiched by demands on either side, forcing you to arrive late or leave early, and otherwise order a salad or other quick, light course that can be consumed and you can be on with your day. The very idea of having an hour for lunch has become a luxury, with a half hour being sufficient for shoveling down an deli salad or sandwich, eaten at your design with one eye on your computer or mobile device.

And that assumes you eat at all.

Lunch still is a defined benefit for many workers, but less so than ever. And that is becoming a health problem for a growing segment of the population that is tied to computers or running like crazy.

National Public Radio’s Hear&Now program http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/03/03/no-lunch-hour recently featured an interview with professor Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California Graduate School of Management and Yen Ha, co-host of the Lunch Studio blog http://www.lunchstudio.com/p/lunch-manifesto.html.  Professor Elsbach summaries, “The work day runs now from much earlier in the morning to late at night, and it’s also not a standard 9 to 5, so for people, when you eat or when you take a break to get some sustenance, it’s not going to be the same. Also, there’s just this demand to be forever available, so people are reluctant to leave their desk in case they miss something.”

Lunch isn’t just about eating; it’s about getting away to another realm – if only another room. “We know that creativity and innovation happen when people change their environment, and especially when they expose themselves to a natural environment,” Elsbach says. “Staying inside, in the same location, is really detrimental to creative thinking. It’s also detrimental to doing that rumination that’s needed for ideas to percolate and gestate and allow a person to arrive at an ‘aha’ moment.”

In a small way, it’s a food-critical moment. For those who really try to follow the recommendation for five portions of fruit and vegetables each day, not luncheon puts a lot of pressure on breakfast and dinner. Of course, you’re not likely to compensate for the lost consumption midday.

Yen Ha has politicized this phenomenon with “A Lunch Manifesto:” Refueling the body with good stuff is “just the side benefits for the true raison d’etre of having lunch every day,” Ha says in the manifesto. “The real reason we have lunch every day boils down to the fact that we love the physical act of eating… Devouring, contemplating, ruminating and purely enjoying what you eat is an undertaking that should be freely and daily exercised.”

Carpe Diem. Have an apple.

Dennis Archambault is director of Public Affairs at Detroit Wayne County Health Authority.