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Personalized nutrition communication through ICT application: how to overcome the gap between potential effectiveness and reality

Abstract

The potential effectiveness of personalized nutrition communication through the Internet is promising in terms of addressing personal relevance, flexibility, interactive options and amount of people that can be reached. However, little research on the contribution to behaviour change has been done. The MyFood program at Wageningen University aims at providing insight into strategies to implement personalized nutrition communication through interactive tools. In this article we present the framework for research on social acceptance of personalized nutrition communication through interactive computer technology as part of the MyFood program.

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Correspondence to L I Bouwman.

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Discussion after Bouwman

Van Weel: You mentioned evidence as a common denominator of how you are bringing this together and how you are going to measure their input. Would it not be interesting to see whether all these partners mean the same by evidence? Beforehand they will all agree that it should be evidence based, but then talk to industry, and maybe they have a completely different concept of what evidence is. This might be a big problem for exercises like this. And the other point, you specifically named public health. But I think you will recruit potential users not so much from the public health but from individual health, and they might be different players.

Bouwman: We are also trying to find those stakeholders for their motivational part in it. You are right.

Van Weel: This is definitely a development we should take on board, but an increasing part of the population at risk at this moment is a population that will never use the internet. Maybe you should not want to use internet, because that might be the main barrier; maybe you should use brochures.

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Bouwman, L., Hiddink, G., Koelen, M. et al. Personalized nutrition communication through ICT application: how to overcome the gap between potential effectiveness and reality. Eur J Clin Nutr 59 (Suppl 1), S108–S116 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602182

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