Two Key Goals of SmartAPPetite

1) The primary goal of SmartAPPetite is to expand people’s food literacy in order to nudge them toward smarter food purchasing and eating behaviours, thereby improving their overall diet quality and health. Poor nutrition contributes to several critical health issues (i.e., obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes) and is a leading cause of premature death.  Identifying effective interventions which improve dietary behaviours of Canadians is vital to lowering their risks of developing diet-related issues and ultimately reducing the financial burden on our health care system.  We hypothesize that greater engagement with SmartAPPetite can help expand one’s food literacy and have positive impacts on dietary behaviours and long-term health.

2) A second goal of SmartAPPetite is to make it easier for people to find, buy and prepare local foods, thereby helping to strengthen the local food economy. Buying local, healthy food has the potential to revitalize our local economies by supporting local farmers and food processors and ensuring they receive a fair price for their products, and receive a greater portion of our ‘food dollar.’  Ontarians currently spend $18 billion annually on food produced outside the province. It has been estimated that if every family in Ontario shifted $10 of their weekly food purchases to local food, Ontario businesses would create 10,000 new jobs and generate an additional $2.4 billion in food sales annually.  We believe that SmartAPPetite can be a powerful tool for the local economy by helping people shift a greater proportion of their food budget toward food produced locally.

The SmartAPPetite Youth Study

We are currently using SmartAPPetite in a healthy eating study with teens in Southwestern Ontario!

Background: As nutrition and health are directly linked, it is alarming that less than half of Canadians aged 12 and older eat the recommended daily servings of fruit and vegetables.  Adolescence is a critical time to intervene to promote healthy dietary behaviours because lifelong eating habits begin in childhood and diet quality tends to sharply decrease around age 14 years and remain low into adulthood. By the time adolescents reach high school they are more independent, and are making more of their own decisions about what food they eat and buy, particularly during school days.

Our primary purpose is to evaluate the effectiveness of SmartAPPetite as part of a 12-week intervention with Ontario youth and young adults. We adopt a multi-dimensional approach to assess the impact of the smartphone intervention on three key dimensions of dietary behaviours among youth and young adults (aged 13-25 years): (1) increasing knowledge about healthy foods (‘food literacy’), (2) encouraging healthier food purchasing (‘food purchasing’), and (3) improving diet quality (‘diet quality’). Our central hypothesis is that increased use of our smartphone intervention will result in greater food literacy, positive shifts in food purchasing habits, and improvement in overall diet quality. Identifying effective interventions which improve dietary behaviours of youth is vital to lowering their risk of diet-related issues now and in the future.  This study has been approved by Non-Medical Research Ethics Board of the University of Western Ontario.