The Hindu Business Line : Techies, watch your waistline

Celebrating healthy bottom-lines is all right, but IT companies better watch out for expanding waistlines that could quite spoil the party for its employees.

A lifestyle study of the country's tech pool workers reveals some astonishing stats: Only about 5 per cent of IT employees eat well-balanced meals and only about 30 per cent of them stretch their muscles regularly.

"These days, very few IT employees eat traditional food; food that they were used to since childhood," says Ms Sheela Krishnaswamy, Managing Partner and Founder, NICHE, a Bangalore-based nutrition information and counselling centre.

For most techies, the `health meal' at the office cafeteria has become an indulgence and that too just twice a week. The rest of the days, it's platefuls of high-calorie and low-fibre food. "This means traditional Indian rice-sambar-roti becomes an alternative. And food oozing with calories, the staple diet."

Ms Krishnaswamy and her team of nutritionists have counselled and educated more than 5,000 IT/ITeS employees across the country on diet and nutrition. "Unfortunately most of them are illiterate as far as nutrition awareness is concerned," she rues. With over 60 per cent of them overweight and nearly 80 per cent of them with a family history of diabetes, hypertension or a cardiac-related problem, they live dangerously.

Ms Krishnaswamy feels there are two major contributors to this unhealthy trend: When companies start out, they consider `lavish buffets' an `employee welfare' programme, without realising that it actually causes much harm in the long run. The second is the increasing number of migrant workers in the industry who neither have the time nor the energy to go home and cook a healthy meal. "Easy availability of tempting foods such as samosas and burgers solves the dinner problem for most of them." As if this is not enough, hectic travel schedules of these employees only add to the inches. "Most of them come back with excess baggage around their waists after a trip abroad," says Ms Krishnaswamy who has advised employees individually and been a corporate advisor at companies such as Wipro, Hewlett Packard, Philips Software Centre and Progeon among others.

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Techies, watch your waistline