Healthy Macau – from a micro to a macro perspective

Renato Marques

Conversations about obesity often focus on individual responsibility. “Eating better, moving more, and trying harder” are typical phrases.
This simplistic framing overlooks a structural reality: many people lack the time, energy, or the conditions to make such choices.
In Macau, long shifts, irregular working schedules, and a work culture built around endurance leave little room for health.

If authorities are serious about tackling rising obesity rates and sedentary lifestyles, they need to stop treating exercise as a personal hobby and recognize it as a public health necessity.

A bold step toward this goal would be to incentivize companies to offer paid workout time as part of the working day, replacing a portion of overtime culture with health-focused time allowances.

The local economy, heavily reliant on tourism and gaming, depends on shift work. Employees often rotate between day and night shifts, endure long hours on their feet or sitting in repetitive roles, and face unpredictable workloads. By the time a shift ends, the idea of going to the gym isn’t just unappealing; it’s often impossible. Add in the prevalence of quick, low-quality meals, and the results are predictable: fatigue, weight gain, and long-term physical and mental health risks follow.

Telling people in this environment to “exercise more” borders on absurd and worsens their mental health, which is already burdened by a lack of time for their families or themselves.

A government-backed workout time allowance would directly address this. Imagine if employees were provided with even 30–60 minutes of paid time per shift cycle for physical activity. This could be used for gym sessions, walking, stretching, or organized fitness programs, even in companies that are eager to promote “wellness” just once a year.

Crucially, it would not reduce rest time, which is already inadequate, but instead would be incorporated into working hours, just like overtime is now.

This isn’t a radical idea. Companies already pay for overtime because productivity demands it. But what if long-term productivity also relied heavily on keeping workers healthy? Benefits like reduced absenteeism, lower healthcare costs, improved morale, and higher sustained performance are all well-supported by evidence of regular physical activity.

In that sense, workout time is not a perk; it is a small, simple investment.
Critics will argue that businesses cannot afford to lose productive hours. However, this assumes that the current system is effective. In reality, overworked and exhausted employees are not functioning at their best. Burnout, turnover, and health-related absences are hidden costs that companies already bear.

Reallocating a fraction of overtime into structured exercise time could actually improve overall output.
And then comes culture. As we all know, in many work environments, long hours are worn as a badge of honor, and changing that mindset requires more than a policy; it requires strong leadership.

If the government signals that health is as important as productivity, as it does with many other areas, companies will follow (they always do).
Incentives like tax breaks, subsidies for workplace health and fitness programs, or even public recognition schemes could speed up this process.

If the Healthy Macau Blueprint is genuinely a policy and not merely a defense mechanism to dodge responsibility, we need to set our sights much higher than just the chocolate milk in schools’ vending machines.

Our scale and structure enable Macau to set an example, redefining what a healthy work-life balance looks like in a modern economy.
If people are too busy to stay healthy, the system is not working.