But it marks something else, too, and you might not be aware of it: September is National Cholesterol Education Month.

The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute division of the National Institutes of Health recommends that you use that designation as a good excuse to get your blood cholesterol checked.

Because high blood cholesterol increases your risk of heart disease, the sooner you take measures to lower it, the better.

More than 65 million Americans have high blood cholesterol, and many of them may not even know it or understand the seriousness of the condition. Awareness is the first step toward making changes that will decrease your risks.

Advise your employees to follow the nation’s directive and have their cholesterol levels checked this month.

Once they’re brought up to speed on the condition and how to combat it, you can step up your efforts to encourage certain health practices and lifestyle changes geared specifically to lowering cholesterol.

Therapeutic lifestyle changes (what the National Cholesterol Education Program refers to as TLC), can make the difference between life and death.

These changes include a low-saturated fat, low-cholesterol diet; losing excess pounds and maintaining a healthy weight; and getting regular exercise.

Come to think of it, those are pretty good guidelines for anyone, no matter what their cholesterol level.

The Best Tweets of the Week:

Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

If it’s potato chips, a candy bar, or maybe even a slice of leftover pizza, it’s time to reevaluate.

When you’re embarking on what is hopefully a long-term commitment to weight management and good health, convenience is a key factor to your success.

The element of convenience is also one of the reasons the vending machine in your office break room is so tempting. Just insert a few coins, press a button or two, and your snack comes right to you like a gift from the munchie gods.

Refueling at some point during the workday is a good way to take the edge off your hunger and keep you from overeating at meals.

But if you’re refueling with empty calories and high-fat or sugar-laden packaged snacks, all you can expect to do is derail your efforts to eat well.

The solution involves more than avoiding the break room and its various temptations like the plague. It starts with making it as easy as possible to snack smart at the office.

Keep healthy snacks at the ready. For those that don’t require refrigeration, you might set aside a “snackpile” in a file cabinet drawer.

Fill small zipper bags with raisins, nuts, whole-grain crackers and natural peanut butter, or some trail mix (Tuesday was National Trail Mix Day. Who knew?).

Brave the break room to stock the fridge with cottage cheese, cut-up veggies with yogurt dip, low-fat yogurt with fruit, or reduced-fat cheese.

Healthy snacks like these will satisfy your need for convenience and your desire for nutrition. As a bonus, they’ll boost your energy and help you get through the day with more focus.

Help your employees on their quest for better health by offering them guidance on how to choose the right foods.

And because not everyone is going to put in the small amount of extra planning and effort involved in prepping snacks for work, consider giving that vending machine an overhaul. Lose some of the junk and replace it with more healthful options.

Promoting positive lifestyle changes such as a healthy diet and regular exercise is your best bet for helping your workers improve their overall health and decrease their cancer risk at the same time.

And while many Americans search for a shortcut via fad diets and infomercial promises, there is simply no replacement for wise (and lifelong) health choices.

Even popular nutritional supplements aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

A new study shows that when it comes to cutting cancer risk, supplements may not deliver. Vitamin C and E capsules were found to be ineffective for that purpose.

What’s more, other studies have shown that certain supplements may actually increase your cancer risk by upsetting the balance of nutrients in your body.

The nutrients your body gets from eating fiber-rich fruits and vegetables, beans, and whole grains serve to deliver the protective health benefits that may not be found in pill form.

The lead study author does note that under certain circumstances, some people benefit from supplements, but for most of us, no pill can replace a healthy diet.

Although there’s no guarantee that eating right will keep you from getting cancer, it’s a safe bet that not doing so will increase your odds.

Advise your employees to consume plenty of foods that contain cancer-fighting antioxidants, which also happen to be pretty good for you in general.

The National Cancer Institute recommends:

Bicycling and brisk walking have been shown to help women control their weight in their 30s and 40s, according to a new study.

The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study found that over the course of 16 years, women who increased biking and brisk walking by 30 minutes per day maintained their weight or shed a few pounds.

Slow walking, on the other hand, did not have the same effect.

Furthermore, women who decreased their time spent cycling from more than 15 minutes to less than 15 minutes a day gained an average of four and a half pounds.

While the study followed only women, we can’t leave out the men. Cardio exercises like biking and walking are good for them, too.

No matter what your gender, exercise as part of a well-rounded, healthy lifestyle aids weight loss and maintenance, prevents disease, and boosts heart health.

Take a cue from the findings of this study and increase your physical activity with a brisk walk or bike ride every day.

With lovely fall weather just around the corner, you’ll find yourself looking forward to your daily workout.

These exercises are popular for good reasons:

Organizing a health fair might be just the thing to help you spread awareness and get your more change-resistant staffers on board.

Because things like health screenings and routine checkups can be inconvenient to schedule and anxiety-provoking to undergo, many people let them slide.

The solution? Bring the appropriate screenings and health information they would get from their primary care physician to them, in their comfort zone.

They’re more likely to participate in an office-wide health fair than they might be to make a doctor’s appointment to test their cholesterol level, blood sugar, and blood pressure, get a flu shot, or find out what their body fat percentage is.

Prevention education is an important aspect of promoting workplace wellness, and you’ll find that the efforts you expend to organize a health fair will be rewarded by employees’ increased awareness and likelihood to act on what they learn about their health at the event.

Whether they choose to incorporate more physical activity into their daily schedules, think before they eat, or just make an appointment for a complete checkup with their doctor, the health fair has been successful.

Some ideas for your health fair:

A new study suggests that nature’s ultimate beverage may be a key to weight loss.

Drinking two 8-ounce glasses of water before each meal can help you shed excess pounds, the researchers found.

Over a 12-week period and following a low-calorie diet, study participants who drank water before meals lost 15.5 pounds. The participants who didn’t drink water before eating lost only 11 pounds.

The water drinkers also kept the weight off for a year after the study.

It makes sense: Water is calorie-free, and drinking it before eating takes the edge off your hunger. The result? You’ll eat less.

While water is not a magic weight-loss potion, it may be the closest thing to one you can drink, and it certainly beats the carbonated, sweetened alternatives you’ll find in your office vending machine.

Speaking of which, get those machines stocked up with bottled water, and spread the findings of this study around the office. Choosing good old H20 in lieu of an afternoon soda can help your employees reach their weight-loss goals.

The Best Tweets of the Week:

Even if you’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your staff members work in comfort, it might not be enough. Ergonomics are important, but they don’t solve everything.

They don’t account for pre-existing back problems, for instance, or fully address the strains of bending and stretching that may occur either inside or outside of the office.

If a worker sustains a back injury while on his own time, he brings that pain to work with him. There it becomes, at best, a dull aching nuisance. At worst, it prevents him from doing his job effectively.

According to the Mayo Clinic, many instances of back pain are caused by a combination of factors.

While hereditary back problems can’t be avoided, some causes of that aching back can be corrected.

If back pain is caused or worsened by being overweight, being out of shape in general, or not having sufficient flexibility, an examination (and possibly an overhaul) of lifestyle factors is in order.

There are steps you can take (and share with your employees) to prevent back pain or injury and to mitigate or ease existing back pain.

The Mayo Clinic offers these tips:

It might be a good idea, according to a new study.

Taking a cholesterol-lowering statin drug along with your fast food lunch could help offset the potential cardiovascular damage from your fat-packed meal, say Imperial College London researchers.

Statins have been shown to effectively reduce LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) and heart attack risk.

The study authors found that a statin drug can decrease your risk to the same degree that a fast-food burger and fries or similar fatty meal increases it.

The authors say that making statin drugs freely available for people to take when they eat these kinds of foods could serve as a preventive measure similar to other safety steps you take when engaging in risky behaviors, such as choosing cigarettes with filters or wearing a seat belt.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that if you take statins you can hit the drive-through every day at lunch without repercussions.

Fast food is as unhealthy as it is convenient, and consuming too much high-fat, high-calorie food will affect your waistline even if you’re neutralizing the heart damage by taking statins.

And obesity has negative effects beyond what a statin can take care of. Joint pain, diabetes, and decreased quality of life are just a few of the potential problems associated with obesity, and that’s not to mention the social and mental implications.

Advise your employees on some healthier fast food options for the next time they visit the nearby burger joint.

How to eat better at the drive-through:

Even more than people who work the standard 9-to-5, shiftworkers often struggle to balance work and life obligations.

For someone who works the graveyard shift, daytime is sleep time.

While the majority of people are slaving away at their own jobs, running errands, and otherwise taking care of business, this shiftworker may be missing out on certain daytime-only opportunities.

It can be discouraging to leave for work just as the kids are going to bed, and challenging to find time to get things done in the small window of time between work shifts and much-needed sleep.

Equally challenged are people who work rotating shifts. They may struggle with a constant attempt to adjust their bodies to sleep and wake cycles, making it difficult to function at work or at home.

Work and life balance is a vital component of happiness both on and off the job. A worker who manages to fit in both to his or her satisfaction will likely be a much more productive and valuable employee.

What can you do to help your shiftworkers maintain a good balance? The answer is easy: Be flexible.

It’s often not convenient or possible for employees who work odd hours to access some of the necessities that others take for granted.

Understand that shiftworkers may need some extra leeway with regard to time off for a variety of reasons.

Because irregular work shifts often make it difficult to schedule doctor’s appointments, incorporating some flexibility to accommodate them is important. Medical care, after all, is one thing you don’t want your workers to miss out on!

But whether it’s going for an annual checkup or to his child’s play, your employee should feel comfortable occasionally asking for a little time off.

While it’s not possible to accommodate every request, keep in mind that the more lenient you are, the happier your employees will be.

That’s sure to make the life of a shiftworker a whole lot more balanced.

New research shows that eating more green, leafy vegetables may significantly decrease your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

With the prevalence of obesity in the United States, type 2 diabetes is also on the rise.

While additional research is needed to expand upon the findings, what researchers have found so far is promising.

When they examined studies comparing the link between diet and diabetes, they found that people who ate the most green, leafy vegetables had a 14% lower chance of developing the disease than those who ate the least of these veggies.

If obesity is an issue in your workplace, type 2 diabetes may follow suit, bringing with it a variety of potential medical problems and costing you in health care and lost workdays.

Share this information with your staff members and advise them to increase their intake of spinach and its culinary brethren in order to decrease their risk for type 2 diabetes.

And while the study did not show a connection between decreased diabetes risk and a higher intake of other types of fruits and vegetables, it may be too early to assume the benefit applies only to leafy greens.

You might include the caveat that more research needs to be done, but because only good things tend to come from enjoying more of nature’s bounty, it won’t hurt to leave that part out.

How green are your employees’ diets?

Offer some tips on getting the most out of these nutritional powerhouses: