One of the most important things you can do to safeguard your health is to eat a healthy, balanced diet. In fact, your lifestyle choices and behaviors, such as eating a nutritious diet and being physically active, can prevent up to 80% of early heart disease and stroke. A good diet can help prevent malnutrition in all of its manifestations, as well as noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. A poor diet and a lack of physical activity are the major global health risks.
People may benefit from totally automated personal nutritional counseling, according to a new study that found an app improved healthy diet in clinical trials.
A report published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research describes how the eNutri app developed by University of Reading researchers in human nutrition and biomedical engineering assisted people in eating more healthily. Participants who received automated customised nutrition advice increased their healthy diet score by 6% when compared to a control group that received broad healthy eating advice.
The research demonstrates that the eNutri technology is effective in helping users to improve their healthy food intake, with a significant improvement in diet quality for the group who had access to automated, personalised nutrition advice.
Dr. Roz Fallaize
“The research demonstrates that the eNutri technology is effective in helping users to improve their healthy food intake, with a significant improvement in diet quality for the group who had access to automated, personalised nutrition advice,” said Dr Roz Fallaize, Dietitian and Research Fellow at the University of Reading’s Department of Food and Nutritional Science.
“While having a registered nutritionist or dietitian giving personalised dietary advice is ideal, this is often only available to those with health concerns or with the financial resource to pay. There is also growing interest in nutrition apps and web services, but many commercial apps tend to focus on weight loss or calorie counting rather than healthy eating.”
“Nutritional advice should always be focused on healthy, balanced diets and positive relationships with food, and I’m pleased that our study helped people eat better. One exciting aspect of the eNutri system is the potential to offer it to lots of people at low-cost”
Dr. Rodrigo Zenun Franco, a PhD graduate from the University of Reading and lead author of the paper said:
“The eNutri app prioritizes evidence-based healthy eating and employs a diet scoring system to deliver food-based advise customised to the particular user. We are continuing to improve eNutri to meet the needs of specific population groups, such as individuals with heart issues, and plan to make it available to the general public in the near future.”
People were assigned to either get personalized nutrition counseling or basic healthy eating guidance. The diets of those in the personalized group were then rated using 11 criteria based on UK dietary advice. The eNutri software provided an automatic assessment of diet quality, assigning a ‘healthy diet score’ of 100 to the user.
A nutritious diet consumed throughout one’s life helps to prevent malnutrition in all of its manifestations, as well as a variety of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and disorders. However, increased processed food production, rising urbanization, and changing lifestyles have resulted in a shift in dietary trends. People are eating more foods that are heavy in energy, fats, free sugars, and salt/sodium, and many people are not eating enough fruits, vegetables, and other dietary fibre, such as whole grains.
Individual attributes (e.g., age, gender, lifestyle, and level of physical activity), cultural background, regionally accessible foods, and dietary habits will all influence the exact composition of a diverse, balanced, and nutritious diet. However, the fundamental concepts of what defines a healthy diet remain unchanged.
The ‘healthy diet score’ comprises assessments of fruit, vegetables, wholegrains, red and processed meat intake, with higher points provided when users consume the appropriate amounts of each. The personalized counsel is then directed toward the aspects of their diet that would benefit the most from modification.
