Workplace Health promotion and Mediterranean diet: a case series

The workplace represents an ideal setting for cardiometabolic prevention, enabling early identification of workers with overweight and metabolic alterations and the implementation of structured lifestyle interventions. In this context, collaboration between the occupational physician and the dietitian integrates risk assessment with a personalized nutritional pathway, aimed at improving adherence to the Mediterranean diet and daily habits.

Within a workplace health promotion study conducted in a university hospital in Rome, two clinical cases are described. The first patient, a 65-year-old woman with overweight, abdominal obesity, impaired fasting glucose, and low adherence to the Mediterranean diet, showed at three-month follow-up a reduction in body weight from 78 to 75 kg, waist circumference from 99 to 97 cm, normalization of blood glucose, and improved dietary and physical activity habits. The second patient, a 61-year-old man with hypercholesterolemia and impaired fasting glucose, initially presented with a weight of 86.7 kg and a waist circumference of 97.5 cm; after three months, weight decreased to 81.5 kg and waist circumference to 93.5 cm, with normalization of altered metabolic parameters.

In both cases, the most relevant outcome was a substantial shift in dietary habits toward a Mediterranean pattern, associated with an overall improvement in lifestyle, with benefits in both anthropometric and metabolic parameters.

These cases suggest that an integrated pathway combining occupational health surveillance and nutritional counseling, embedded within workplace health services, may represent an effective, sustainable, and reproducible approach for preventing non-communicable chronic diseases, strengthening the role of the workplace as a key setting for health promotion.