Tag: health care

Personalized Coupons, Recipes and Education Helped Shoppers Make Healthier Food Purchases

we are interested in scaling this work so it can reach more US adults and help them improve their diet quality and diet-related health.

WeightControl.com Interview with:
Maya Vadiveloo, PhD, RD
Assistant Professor
Nutrition and Food Sciences
University of Rhode Island

Dr.  Vadiveloo

WeightControl.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Response: We conducted this study with the goal of helping people make healthier dietary choices while at the grocery store. We know that food companies use personalized messages and discounts that prompt people to buy unhealthy foods. We tested whether similar approaches could be used to encourage people to buy healthier foods by sending people 2 personalized, healthy food coupons each week to make these foods more affordable. We also wanted our recommendations to reflect people’s dietary preferences, so we only sent people coupons that aligned with preferences they told us at the beginning of the study .

The coupons were directly linked to people’s loyalty cards and they also received a brief nutrition message and recipe via email every week.

Overall, we found that people liked the personalized healthy food incentives, that it prompted them to purchase more healthy foods, and improved the overall diet quality of their grocery purchases.

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Weight Loss in Low Income Patients in Primary Care Settings

Clinically significant weight loss is possible in underserved, low-income patients in primary care settings.

WeightControl.com Interview with:
Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., FACSM, FAHA, FTOS
Professor and Marie Edana Corcoran Endowed Chair
Pediatric Obesity and Diabetes
Assoc Exec Dir for Population and Public Health Sciences
Pennington Biomedical Research Center
Baton Rouge, LA

WeightControl.com:  What is the background for this study?

Response: Obesity remains one of the greatest public health threats, and there is good evidence that intensive lifestyle interventions should be a primary approach to obesity management and treatment. However, there has been minimal uptake of obesity treatment approaches in primary care, which is the cornerstone of medicine in the US.

WeightControl.com: What are the main findings?

Response: We developed an intervention to reduce calorie intake and increase physical activity that was delivered by health coaches embedded in primary care clinics. The sample was diverse with a large percentage of low-income and African American patients. The results demonstrated that patients in the intensive lifestyle intervention lost approximately 5% of their initial body weight, compared to patients in usual care who lost about 0.5% of their body weight. These weight loss differences between the two groups were maintained out to 2 years, which demonstrates the durability of the intervention.    

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