Miners dangerously overweight
Shift work, long hours and being too tired to exercise or make good food choices has seen the weight of Australia’s mining workers balloon to dangerous levels with up to 75 per cent at risk of diabetes type 2, according to medical experts.
Diabetes Queensland has created wellness programs tailored to miners that promote good food choices and at least 30 minutes of daily exercise and taken them to a number of mining operations.
However, the organisation warns that all Queenslanders are at risk, not just miners, predicting that if current trends continued diabetes rates would double and about 65 per cent of Queenslanders would be overweight or obese by 2020.
Diabetes Queensland has also teamed up with the Heart Foundation, Cancer Council Queensland and Nutrition Australia Queensland to push the national campaign Swap it, don’t stop it to promote healthy lifestyle changes.
“The beauty of the Swap It campaign is the practical way it encourages people to make simple, incremental changes in their everyday lives, in their own way and their own time,” says Diabetes Queensland’s CEO Michelle Trute.
“Unless action is taken now to eat healthily, move more and lose weight, we face being the first generation of Queenslanders not to outlive our parents,” she says.
“Collectively we are saying enough is enough before chronic disease becomes an even greater burden on the community, our home lives, work productivity and economic prosperity.”
Swap It is funded by Queensland Health to June 2013 under the National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health, as part of a joint Australian, State and Territory Government initiative. For information www.swapit.gov.au
In a separate report by ABC Radio, Mount Isa’s mining workers were identified as at particular risk of disease with three in four mine workers there already overweight.
Ms Trute told the ABC that a number of the mining employers had already created wellness programs for their employees including the McCarthur Coal Mine near Mackay.
“Where you’ve got a high proportion of shift workers and where you’ve got a high proportion of workers who don’t have a lot of opportunities throughout the day to move around and walk around – they’re the sort of things that are going to increase the likelihood of being obese,” she told ABC Radio.
