According to a report in a US occupational journal, companies could save millions of dollars in health care costs by simply providing more of an incentive for their employees to exercise.

In the latest issue of The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Feifei Wang and colleagues at Michigan university studied the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI), physical activity and health care costs, taking a target group of 23,490 active employees of General Motors.

Grouped into three categories – normal weight, overweight and obese – the study revealed that even getting the most sedentary workers in the group to exercise would save around $790,000 per year, or 1.5 per cent of health care costs for the whole group.

Across the whole of the company, the potential annual savings could reach $7.1m.

Researchers also found that, by adding two or more days of light exercise – judged to be at least 20 minutes of exercise hard enough to increase heart rate and breathing – costs for health care were lowered by an average of $500 per employee, per year.

Of the 23,490 workers studied, an estimated 30 per cent were of normal weight, 45 per cent were overweight and 25 per cent were obese. Details: www.joem.org