The Impact of Nutrition at the Workplace With Clare Kelly
Clare Kelly has been working with Food Choice for over 9 years now, right since its inception. She initially worked as project manager for the Food Choice trial, where she was extensively involved in implementation, data collection, analysis, and expansion of Food Choice. Clare has co-authored many Food Choice publications, and she currently manages the Food Choice team and clients. Clare has a BSc in Nutritional Sciences from UCC, and not one but two Masters. The first is in Environmental Health and Safety Management, and the second is in Public Health. Clare's research interests include public health, nutrition, and diet-related diseases.
What was the stepping stone for Food Choice as a company?
Dr Fiona Geaney developed the healthy eating management system during her doctoral training in UCC. The study was validated over seven years, with over 850 employees in leading multinationals. The trial showed that this complex intervention that combined nutrition education and environmental modification methods reduced the intake of salt and saturated fat. Employees also improved their knowledge of nutrition and saw a decrease in their BMI. Combining this intervention with the education and the environmental changes proved to be cost-effective in terms of reducing absenteeism, and created a positive benefit for the workplace overall. Following the study's positive results, Food Choice now operates as a scientifically proven healthy eating management system for employees.
Food Choice and Nudge Theory?
Nudge theory is a big part of what Food Choice does. Nudge theory talks about improving decision making for health, wealth, and happiness; it's an effective method to help influence healthy behaviours. Food Choice is also based on choice architecture; this means that they try to create positive reinforcement with indirect suggestions for healthy food choices. The overall goal is to improve employees' daily behaviours, so it's all about nudging employees in the right direction to make a healthy choice over a convenient or easy option.
An example of how Food Choice implements this is reengineering employee's eating environment with simple changes. It could be looking at a vending machine's location, so it's not completely visible or strategically positioning healthier alternatives. All these methods would increase the number and availability of healthy options while still keeping current options.
What does the process of bringing Food Choice into an organisation look like?
Food Choice is a digital healthy eating management system with a cloud-based platform that allows integrations with all key stakeholders. The programme is tailored to every organisation’s culture; that is why each company works with a dedicated Food Choice leader, who is a qualified Nutritionist or Dietician.
Food Choice starts by working closely with caterers and key contacts in the HR department. A big part of the Food Choice Program is the environment dietary modification aspect, so an essential first step would be menu review and modification. Using their nutritional analysis software, each site leader is responsible for analysing the recipes in their own company's environment. It is all done through the Food Choice platform, where the leader, the Food Choice experts, and the caterers can communicate and decide which recipe modifications make sense and can be applied.
During this time, employees are also offered nutritional education through the employee app, emails, and vlog-style videos. The information is bespoke to each organisation Food Choice is working with. Employees can also use the app to get detailed nutritional information. They can filter by meal choice, by the type of restaurants within that environment, by date, etc. So it helps them to plan their meals.
How can people make the right food choices while working from home?
Clare says it's all about setting small, realistic targets and implementing small, natural changes for ourselves. Taking a practical approach is much better than cutting all the "unhealthy" variables at once because that never really works. Her critical tips for people working from home at the moment would be to stick to an eating routine, maybe the same one that applied to their workplace. Also, avoid snacking at the desk and choose a designated place to have meals or snacks. Sticking to a routine while at home might be challenging at first, so she suggests setting calendar reminders for these breaks and building them into your routine like work tasks.
You can watch the video of our conversation through this link.
Want to get more information about Clare and Food Choice? Go to www.foodchoiceatwork.com to find publications, programmes and to get in touch with the team.