The Impact of a Policy-Based Multicomponent Nutrition Pilot Intervention on Young Adult Employee’s Diet and Health Outcomes

Abstract

Influencing workplace policies and offering additional dietary support could lead to meaningful changes in employees' diet and health and may change workplace culture.

Mixed methods evaluation of an employer-led, free lunch initiative in Northern Ireland

“…Employees who agreed to take part were invited for two 20 to 30 min appointments at baseline and at 6 months for a follow-up. These were scheduled by the site manager and conducted during working hours by the researcher using similar methods as described previously [11], but are summarised below.…”

“…To account for differences between OFF duty and ON duty eating habits, recalls were taken Mondays and on one other weekday. The 24-h diet recall was an adapted version of the validated UK standard 24-h diet recall as used previously for workplace diet interventions [11,12]. All diet recalls were entered using the dietary analysis software package WISP (Weighed Intake Software Program; Tinuviel Software, Warrington, UK).…”

“…Semi-structured interviews were carried out with stakeholders and employees to assess their motivation and views on healthy eating at work and the acceptability of the lunches. The topic guide was developed by the research team with questions that were adapted from previous qualitative studies [8,11,17] (Additional file 1). Questions regarding improvement suggestions were included at follow-up.…”

Improvement in Healthy Meal Index, Lunch Quality, and Diversity Scores Following an Integrated Nutritional Intervention in a Communal Dining Room: The NEKST Study

“…In previous works, changes in the food served, such as increasing the availability and variety of healthy food options, enhanced diet quality [17][18][19][20][21][22], and environmental actions, such as changing the location of different food items on a buffet [23] or communicating nutritional messages in the food environment [24][25][26], encouraged adopting a healthier diet. Using a combination of these domains of action has been shown to have a positive effect on nutritional choices [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. However, in most studies, intervention programs were based solely on dietary recommendations rather than on diners' preferences, and study outcomes were based on cashier sales [24,26,28,32,36,37], and self-reported food choices using participant interviews and/or questionnaires [27][28][29]32,34].…”

“…Using a combination of these domains of action has been shown to have a positive effect on nutritional choices [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. However, in most studies, intervention programs were based solely on dietary recommendations rather than on diners' preferences, and study outcomes were based on cashier sales [24,26,28,32,36,37], and self-reported food choices using participant interviews and/or questionnaires [27][28][29]32,34]. Several recent intervention studies in dining systems, mainly at military bases [22,30,31], examined the effect of interventions on food consumption using the digital food photography method, yet they did not follow the same cohort of participants before and after the intervention [22,30,31,33].…”