Potential impact
The general objective of this project is to advance knowledge on how digital choice environments affect SEP-related disparities in healthy food choice.
Potential impact
Unhealthy eating is responsible for 8% of the burden of disease in the Netherlands, leads to 12.900 deaths per year and is associated with 6 billion euros in health care expenditure. Despite governmental efforts, the prevalence of overweight and obesity still rises and the proportion of the population adhering to nutrition guidelines remains low, especially in people with a lower SEP.
Unhealthy lifestyles, like an unhealthy diet, are driven by a complex interplay of system-level factors, i.e., factors underpinning the food environment, including physical and economic elements, as well as individual-level factors such as knowledge, motivation, and preferences. In physical, “offline”, settings, both system-level and individual-level factors currently place individuals with a lower SEP at a health disadvantage. The digital transformation of food retail environments, with food decisions increasingly being made within online contexts (e.g., websites and smartphone apps) offers a timely opportunity for decreasing social health disparities by leveraging both system-level and individual-level factors in digital food retail environments.
This project ties in directly with a recent, steep world-wide increase in the use of food-retail applications, which was dramatically accelerated by the corona pandemic. Even most low to mid-range supermarkets employ retail apps that allow online ordering of products and/or provide information about discounts and loyalty programs, thus reaching individuals across the SEP gradient. Personalized digital interventions can also be extrapolated to other types of healthy food applications and other domains of responsible consumption that are multi-faceted and complex, such as sustainable food choices.
All-in all, this project has the potential to contribute to a lower burden of disease and a reduction in associated healthcare costs of unhealthy eating and associated chronic diseases, by explaining the drivers for healthy eating, and by providing innovative tools that stimulate healthy food choices in the digital environment.
Duration
The project will run from January 2024 – December 2027.
This project is funded by Tilburg University’s Digital Sciences for Society program:
Get ready for the digital future
The Digital Sciences for Society program invests in impactful research, education and collaboration aimed at seizing the opportunities and dealing with the challenges of digitalization for science and society.