Diet habits in shiftworkers: A project for a balanced diet

Working hours can influence the habits of workers, in particular shift working have an important impact on sleep and diet attitudes of workers. Most frequent disorders due to shift work are irregular sleep, gastrointestinal disorders and anxiety. This, as reported in literature, can be factors for an increased risk of cardiovascular accidents in these group of workers especially in association of obesity, smoke or sedentary life habits. In addition workers that used to have frequent night shifts have an higher incidence of accidents usually caused by somnolence. On these basis we programmed an intervention to improve the alimentations in shift workers. Our project is designed in five steps: 1) valuation of physical parameters of workers (height, weight, abdominal circumference), 2) interview to the workers about diet, sleep habits and symptoms by two questionnaires, 3) frontal lesson about correct diet and sleep good behaviours, 4) individual meetings between obese workers and a dieticians, 5) revaluation of point 1 and 2 one year after intervention. At the moment point 4 of our project is running.