Why tea, coffee and energy drinks are killing your profits.

How many teas and coffees do you and your team go through each day, week or year?

How many energy drinks do your team get through with the ridiculous belief that they do anything other than spike insulin and cortisol?

Why should you care?

After all its kind of customary isn't it?

Get the teas and coffees in before a meeting. Why would this be such a problem?

Well, consider the biggest asset/liability on your balance sheet........your people.

Rather than chase new sales, how about working on maximising your people's cognitive ability to be smarter and more effective?

So let's start with coffee. Caffeine when used well, approx 3mg per kilo of body weight, can be very effective in producing great results. Increased energy and focus are often the results. But it can be misused and cause a lot of side effects. Generally, it shouldn't be consumed after 12 pm. If it is then it can start to cause one of the major malfunctions in cognitive ability.....it disrupts the circadian rhythm and causes sleep deprivation.

This has a knock-on effect. People don't sleep well so guess what they do....have more coffee! Down we go.

On top of having too much coffee we also then go onto poison our brains with milk and sugar....although thankfully this is starting to reduce as people increase their level of education.

According to a Harvard review drinking a lot of cows milk can cause prostate cancer in men. Also because of the peptides in milk and intolerances in a lot of people, it can create cognitive sluggishness. As an aside, much of the farmed milk contains high levels of antibiotics. This allows the animals to pack on size and keep alive in some appalling conditions. It also causes insulin spikes that can pile on the calories in fat-storing sites on the body.

Then we put sugar in the tea or coffee. Sugar is very effective at altering hormone response and brain function making us crave more of it. A network of neurotransmitters in the brain respond to the food we eat. In the case of sugar and sugary carbs (that's the pastries), the network is inhibited which slows down energy and makes us less alert.

Sugar also spikes insulin which increases cortisol (that's the hormone in the brain that causes stress) and that can help to pile on the pounds.

I won't go into "energy drinks". I'm sure that you can work that one out for yourself.

So how does this translate into the bottom line?

If you fill your people with these sort of drinks, expect a lack of sharpness and potential illness over the long term. This will reduce profits, slow down new ideas and the ability to learn. Your competition could leave you behind.

One of my clients invested in a nutritionist to do an assessment for all the team on the Company. This was to help educate them on their own genotype and helped them create a nutrition plan that allowed them to be healthy and mentally sharp.

The ROI was very well worth that phone call!

So what's the point of all this?

Consider the environment that you're creating for your team. What would banning energy drinks, caffeine after 12 pm and increase water intake do for them?

We talk a lot about competency skills and behaviours at work. But nutrition is always put to the side. Sounds crazy when you say it out loud.

After all, why would you invest in a F1 car and fill it with crap fuel? Yet that is what we are doing with our people every day.

Gallup estimates that up to 75% of your salary bill is wasted due to a lack of productivity.

By helping them with their nutrition you might just get far more bang for your buck!