A Health App Using Recipes and Education Components to Facilitate Sustainable and Healthier Diets.

Overview

This study is a pilot trial of a smartphone app to promote sustainable and healthy eating, running for 10 weeks. The app is called "See Yourself Differently" (syd), which aims to promote general wellbeing in the working population. The investigators are interested in the feasibility and acceptability of the plant-based recipes and information pages, so the focus will be on how people engage with these features and how they meet their needs. Participants will be randomised into three groups: 1. General information (no app) 2. syd app (app as it stands) 3. syd app with recipes and food education messages (app + messages) Data on demographics and food choice will be collected at the start and end of the intervention. A subset of participants will also take part in short interviews to talk about their experiences.

Overall aim: This pilot trial aims to understand the feasibility and acceptability of the syd app. The main focus is around the plant-based recipes and information pages delivered through the chat functionality. Specific objectives: The primary objective is to understand the feasibility and acceptability of setting up and running a trial with the syd app, focusing on the reach, adoption, implementation, and maintenance. The secondary objectives are to explore the indicative efficacy of the app in facilitating more sustainable and healthier diets, measured by a change in meat and legume intake, to what extent the recipes and information pages contribute to this effect, and whether there is a relationship between the self-perceived capabilities, opportunities and motivations to consume a sustainable and healthier diet. Intervention: The overall aim of syd is to enhance general wellbeing across nine domains, through completing activities and forming micro habits. The app has five main pages (Home, Daily Plan, Journal, Profile, and Chat). Users can input a goal, browse the 'activity pages', enter them into their daily plan, and complete them. When interacting with the app by completing activities, conversing in the chat, journaling or through other methods, the app calculates their 'life quality index' across all domains and presents this to users in the profile page. As the app focuses on multiple health behaviours rather than dietary change specifically, only some of the features are relevant to diet, mainly the 'activity pages' that contain food-related information and recipes. The information pages contain general information on certain aspects of diets for health and sustainability, quick tips in achieving dietary goals, and more detailed information on "What", "Why" and "How" one can adopt healthy dietary principles. The recipes are available for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and vary in their composition of healthy and sustainable foods. The chat function uses a large language model to converse and recommend content to users based on their engagement in the app overall, as well as the prompts users input into the chat. Sample size: The target sample size will be 99 (33 per arm), which will account for the possibility of 40% dropout in the first two weeks, which is typical for smartphone apps, and would still suffice the rule of thumb for 25 per group to be included in a pilot study to yield a small standardised effect size. Outcomes: Outcomes (and data) that will be collected and include 1) programme reach (population characteristics), 2) adoption of the app (participation and retention rates), 3) acceptability of the intervention (engagement with and usefulness of the app features), 4) implementation of delivering the intervention (compliance), 5) maintenance of the intervention (participant and organizational sustainability), and 6) efficacy of the intervention (indications of change in behavioural determinants and behaviours).