Better food choices among users of the Digital Food Guide: a report from Brazil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29397/reciis.v12i3.1308Keywords:
Health promotion, Disease prevention, Medical technology, Public health, Feeding behavior, Food, Novel technology, Smart phone, Dietary assessment, Mobile food record.Abstract
Easy access to information provides an opportunity to promote healthy food choices. This study presents the Digital Food Guide (DFG), an application for smartphones, and assesses its ability to promote healthy food choices. Users record their food intake and receive data regarding food groups and Diet Quality Index, a score associated with the DFG. This study analyzed the reported food intake and body weight of 442 users of both genders aged 19 to 50 years. After using the app, approximately one-third of the participants improved their dietary pattern and 60% lost weight (p < 0.01). The percentage of individuals consuming a poor-quality diet decreased by 8.5%, individuals consuming an intermediate-quality diet increased by 6.8% and individuals consuming a high-quality diet increased by 1.6% (p = 0.01). Information technologies may be additional resources by supporting nutritional education, thus helping individuals to eat consciously with positive health outcomes.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Author’s rights: The author retains unrestricted rights over his work.
Rights to reuse: Reciis adopts the Creative Commons License, CC BY-NC non-commercial attribution according to the Policy on Open Access to Knowledge by Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. With this license, access, download, copy, print, share, reuse, and distribution of articles is allowed, provided that it is for non-commercial use and with source citation, granting proper authorship credits and reference to Reciis. In such cases, no permission is required from the authors or editors.
Rights of authors’s deposit / self-archiving: The authors are encouraged to deposit the published version, along with the link of their article in Reciis, in institutional repositories.