Background:

Workers with a harmful nutritional status present a higher rate of absenteeism, which implies an increase in the business expenses and a decline in productivity. An intervention at the workplace would be optimal since about a third of our time is spent there.

Objectives:

Assessing the repercussion and the efficacy of health promotion programs on the nutritional status of the working population in the last five years.

Data sources:

Studies from Medline, Web of Science (WOS), Cochrane and SCOPUS were collected, consistent with PICO system (problem, intervention, comparison and outcome).

Inclusion and exclusion criteria:

Workers from 18 years old are included, regardless of their workplace or job. Workers with a body-mass index higher than 30, sick people or people with a pharmacological intervention are excluded.

Evaluation and synthesis methods:

A synthesis of the articles was conducted and collected in a table, as well as a narrative summary.

Results:

Twenty-seven (n=72632) were the number of studies which met the inclusion criteria. Nine of the studies analysing nutrition programs showed differences. The modification of the physical exercise routine resulted in positive results in seven of the studies. The synergy of nutrition and physical activity improvements obtained significant results in two of them in relation to the control group. Women exhibited a bigger adherence.

Conclusions:

It is proposed to conduct protocolized studies of longer duration, interventions with defined and validated objectives, besides an appropriate evaluation of the data to improve the quality.

Limitations:

The recruitment data and the description of the interventions were of low-quality. The absence of quantitative data prevents the reporting of meta-analysis.