Army looks to outsmart soldiers’ bad habits


 at the Army Times: “You wouldn’t think that moving the salad bar to the front of the chow hall and moving the dessert bar back 10 feet would make the Army healthier. But at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that bumped up salad sales about 24 percent and dessert sales down 10 percent, a nudge toward goals of soldiers eating, exercising and sleeping healthier.

That’s just an example of the kind of change Army Medical Command hopes to inspire and successes it hopes to share across installations through its first annual Health of the Force report.

“I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with this inaugural report,” said Col. Deydre Teyhen during a recent roundtable at Defense Health Agency headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia.  “I think we can’t get to a better state of health unless we inform people of what’s working out there in the field.”

The Army hopes to reduce the figure of 17 percent of soldiers not medically deployable within 72 hours. …The overarching philosophy of these recent MEDCOM efforts is to improve overall health rather than play whack-a-mole with problems as they arise. Teyhen pointed out that the average soldier is a patient at a health care facility for about 100 minutes per year, and the trick is to influence soldier health choices over the other 525,500 minutes, extending influence outside of brick-and-mortar health facilities.It dovetails with the Army’s Performance Triad, the plan to improve readiness through sleep, nutrition and exercise….(More)”