Employees who receive automated emails and letters with personalized feedback on their cafeteria purchases may choose healthier food, according to a new study published June 7 in JAMA Network Open.
The study — led by researchers at Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital — examined 602 Mass General employees who regularly used the hospital's cafeterias. Researchers found that automated intervention using food purchasing data increased healthy cafeteria purchases but did not prevent weight gain.
For the study, researchers recruited workers from September 2016 to February 2018, and participants were in either an intervention group or control group.
The intervention group received two emails per week for a 12-month period that included feedback on their previous cafeteria purchases and offered personalized health and lifestyle tips, said Mass General. Intervention group participants also received monthly letters that provided comparisons of their purchases with their peers' purchases, as well as financial incentives for healthier purchases, the hospital said. Control participants received monthly letters with general healthy lifestyle information.
Each person was in an active phase of the study for one year and was followed up for another year after that, meaning a person recruited in February 2018 would have finished follow-up in January 2020. Data were analyzed from May to September of last year.
After examining data, researchers said they found that participants in the intervention group increased their healthy cafeteria food purchases more than control group participants. Those who received automated emails and letters with personalized feedback also purchased fewer calories daily. These differences remained consistent during the intervention year, as well as during the follow-up year. However, researchers found no differences between the groups as far as weight change at the end of either 12-month period.
"Few if any prior workplace studies have been able to make sustained changes in dietary choices of employees," lead author Anne Thorndike, MD, an investigator in the division of general internal medicine at Mass General and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a news release. "This study provides evidence that food-purchasing data can be leveraged for delivering health promotion interventions at scale."
Read the full study here.