Evidence

The numbers behind food as medicine.

Corporate wellness is a $716 conversation that needs to become a $7,400 one. Every figure below is sourced. Every source is linked. Our position is built on research anyone can audit.

The core arithmetic

The gap between what employers spend on wellness and what diet-driven illness costs them is where Growstead operates.

Well-being incentive spend
$716
The amount employers pay employees to engage with wellness. Measured in incentives, gift cards, and HSA funding.
Fidelity Investments and Business Group on Health, Employer-Sponsored Health and Well-being Survey, 2024. View source →
Annual per-employee cost line
$7,400
Diet-driven chronic-condition healthcare, absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. The cost line a CFO actually pays.
Growstead composite estimate. Components: CDC Chronic Disease Facts, CDC Foundation Worker Illness and Injury, IBI Poor Health Costs, SHRM Turnover Cost Calculation. See methodology →
The implication. A wellness benefit that moves even 10% of the diet-driven cost line returns more than the entire wellness spend. That's the arena Growstead was built to compete in. The evidence below is how we defend that claim.

The full evidence base.

Organized by the question each finding answers: what is the economic weight of diet-driven disease, what happens clinically when nutrition improves, what does workforce productivity look like on both sides of the line, what return does a nutrition intervention generate, and what baseline behaviors are we working against.

Economic impact
What does it cost?
$1.72T
U.S. annual cost of obesity. Direct medical costs of $480.7 billion plus $1.24 trillion in lost productivity. Equal to 9.3% of US GDP.
Milken Institute, America's Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Costs of Excess Weight. View →
$7,400
U.S. employer cost per employee, per year, attributable to diet-driven chronic conditions: healthcare, absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover combined.
Growstead composite estimate. See methodology →
$716
U.S. employer spend per employee, per year, on well-being incentives: the amount employers pay employees to engage with wellness.
Fidelity Investments and Business Group on Health, Employer-Sponsored Health and Well-being Survey, 2024. View →
Clinical outcomes
What changes when nutrition changes?
49%
Reduction in inpatient hospitalizations among medically tailored meal recipients, matched-cohort study of 1,020 MassHealth participants. Monthly healthcare costs $753 lower for recipients.
Berkowitz et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, June 2019. View →
0.3-2.0%
HbA1c reduction at 3 months from medical nutrition therapy provided by a registered dietitian, adults with type 2 diabetes. Sustained or improved at 12 months with ongoing support.
Franz et al., Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, October 2017. View →
7.1%
Average A1c reduction (8.5 to 7.9) and 55% of participants experienced blood pressure improvement when a regional food hub connected local farmers to a health system and a major insurer.
M Health Fairview, The Good Acre, and UnitedHealth Group. American Hospital Association 2025 Foster G. McGaw Prize recipient. View →
Workforce productivity
What does the workplace pay?
$3,900
Per employee per year in absence-related productivity losses. Single-source clean figure for absence plus presenteeism combined.
Integrated Benefits Institute, Poor Health Costs US Employers $575 Billion. View →
540M
Workdays lost each year to chronic health conditions in the United States. Drives a national productivity hit of $225.8 billion.
Cedargate, The U.S. Health Disadvantage Costs Employers Billions Every Year. View →
7x
Medical claims ratio for workers with obesity compared to healthy-weight colleagues. Workers compensation days run 3x higher (8.59 vs. 2.92).
PMC, peer-reviewed analysis of obesity and workplace cost. View →
Return on investment
What does intervention return?
$3.27
Return per dollar invested in workplace wellness programs in healthcare cost savings. Absentee day costs fall by $2.73 per dollar spent.
Baicker, Cutler, and Song, Health Affairs, February 2010. View →
$2.71
Return on every dollar Johnson and Johnson invested in workplace wellness. Total savings: $250 million over 10 years.
InFeedo, Corporate Wellness Programs Worth Every Penny. View →
Behavioral baseline
What are we working against?
55%
Of American daily calories come from ultra-processed foods. Children ages 6-11 sit at 64.8%.
CDC NCHS Data Brief No. 536, August 2025. View →
1 in 10
U.S. adults meet federal fruit or vegetable intake recommendations. 12.3% meet fruit recommendations; 10.0% meet vegetable recommendations.
CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, January 7, 2022. View →
150%+
ROI for comprehensive wellness programs (4 or more types of support) compared to 0-50% for narrow programs. Doing wellness halfway does not produce half the ROI.
Wellhub, Return on Wellbeing 2024 Report. View →

How we use this evidence.

Every figure on this page is drawn from peer-reviewed research, federal health data, or established industry benchmarks. Where a number is our own composite, we say so and link to the underlying primary sources.

The arithmetic that drives Growstead's model is straightforward. Diet-driven chronic disease costs U.S. employers more per employee than almost any other category of spend they manage. The evidence that nutrition intervention moves that cost is robust. The evidence that most wellness technology does not is also robust. Those two facts, taken together, are the case for the benefit.

We update this page quarterly as new research is published. If you find a source you'd like us to review, let us know.

$7,400: Methodology

The $7,400 per-employee figure is a Growstead composite of four primary-source components, each grounded in published data. The total sits in the defensible $7,000-$9,000 per-employee range when component sources are added together.

$3,020
Employee healthcare costs
90% of US health spending goes to chronic-and-mental-health-condition patients; chronic-disease patients have direct healthcare costs averaging roughly $6,032 per year. Employer share carved out from the national figure.
CDC Chronic Disease Facts. View source →
$2,010
Absenteeism
$1,685 per employee in baseline absenteeism cost (2015 data, updated for diet-driven condition stacking). Aggregate workplace cost of worker illness and injury: $225 billion.
CDC Foundation, Worker Illness and Injury Costs US Employers $225 Billion Annually. View source →
$1,370
Presenteeism
$3,900 per employee in combined absence and presenteeism cost across the U.S. workforce. Presenteeism share carved out for this component.
Integrated Benefits Institute, Poor Health Costs US Employers $575 Billion. View source →
$1,000
Turnover costs
Replacement cost 50-200% of annual salary. Conservative attribution to poor-health-driven turnover within the composite.
SHRM Turnover Cost Calculation. View source →

Total: $7,400 per employee per year, within the defensible $7,000-$9,000 range derived from the four primary-source components.

Ready to see the business case?

A 30-minute conversation with our team will cover what a Growstead partnership looks like, how we structure outcome measurement, and what a year-one return target will look like for your population.

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