Promoting healthy dietary behaviour through personalised nutrition: technology push or technology pull?

Abstract

The notion of educating the public through generic healthy eating messages has pervaded dietary health promotion efforts over the years and continues to do so through various media, despite little evidence for any enduring impact upon eating behaviour. There is growing evidence, however, that tailored interventions such as those that could be delivered online can be effective in bringing about healthy dietary behaviour change. The present paper brings together evidence from qualitative and quantitative studies that have considered the public perspective of genomics, nutrigenomics and personalised nutrition, including those conducted as part of the EU-funded Food4Me project. Such studies have consistently indicated that although the public hold positive views about nutrigenomics and personalised nutrition, they have reservations about the service providers' ability to ensure the secure handling of health data. Technological innovation has driven the concept of personalised nutrition forward and now a further technological leap is required to ensure the privacy of online service delivery systems and to protect data gathered in the process of designing personalised nutrition therapies.

Providing Personalised Nutrition: Consumers' Trust and Preferences Regarding Sources of Information, Service Providers and Regulators, and Communication Channels

“…However, among communication channels, the strongest predictor of intention to adopt personalised nutrition was email contacts from named people, such as the family doctor. Prior findings suggest that online personalised nutrition companies, based on email contacts instead of personal meetings, are preferred by some groups owing to the anonymity and convenience associated with these features [14,16,29,42] .…”

“…An explanation may be that some of the benefits from potential personalised nutrition users are not "classical" health issues (such as disease prevention or treatment), but also focus on prevention, fitness, and quality of life [14,42] . High trust in the department of health may therefore be related to an individual's health motivation to follow the classical health perspective, which would be based on trust in health care departments but go against the adoption of non-traditional personalised nutrition services.…”

Public perceptions of personalised nutrition through the lens of Social Cognitive Theory

“…A substantial body of qualitative research has investigated the general public's willingness to accept genetic testing (see Stewart-Knox et al, 2015 for a review). Relatively few qualitative studies, however, have considered personalised nutrition.…”

Capturing health and eating status through a nutritional perception screening questionnaire (NPSQ9) in a randomised internet-based personalised nutrition intervention: the Food4Me study

“…Estimation of fruit and vegetable intake by short questionnaires has been widely studied by numerous researchers [ 62 – 64 ], also using the telephone [ 54 , 65 ] or Internet [ 66 ]. In the present study, we used on-line contact, an approach in which the possibility of reaching large populations to promote healthier behaviours is notably increased, given the feasibility of using the internet worldwide [ 67 ], and the benefits and reliability of this approach [ 27 , 29 ].…”