IBI gets right to that point: "In addition to increasing the risk of permanently disabling or life-threatening conditions and increasing healthcare costs, employees with diabetes report more lost work time due to absence and impaired performance than workers with normal blood glucose."

If you haven't run across it before now, the Integrated Benefits Institute is a leading workforce health and productivity research and measurement organization.

IBI's latest analysis is based on data from 99,558 employees across 55 employers. In other words, it did its homework. Citing government statistics, IBI noted that about 26 million people in the United States have diabetes, and about 7 million of these individuals are undiagnosed, and that if the trends continue, one in three adult Americans will have diabetes by 2050. Furthermore, according to IBI's research:

• Employees with diabetes are more likely to miss work because of illness. On average, the odds of missing at least one day of work in the last month were 47 percent higher for workers with diabetes than for employees with normal fasting blood glucose. By contrast, the odds for a worker with pre-diabetes were only 16 percent higher than the odds for a worker with normal blood glucose.
• People with diabetes report lower job performance. Diabetic employees report slightly lower job performance than employees with normal blood glucose levels, even after adjusting for other health conditions.

That's troubling stuff, and definitely important for employers and their HR managers to know. Actually, IBI thinks employers should act on the data, rather than merely file it away.   

Employers, according to IBI President Thomas Parry, should think about improving diabetes awareness, encouraging healthy lifestyles and introducing disease management in their workplaces.

Best yet, "the same programs that employers can introduce to manage diabetes — with their emphasis on diet, exercise and coping skills — also help keep healthy workers healthy and support an overall culture of health."

And that, it is hoped, will help keep health care lower for employers and their employees.

One more thought: If this sort of involvement in your health by employers smacks of George Orwell's dystopian novel, I'd say live with it. Unlike the NSA and Facebook's activities, this is your employer actually doing something good for you.

It's Nanny State behavior, no doubt. But you might feel better and live longer.