Currently, in-club cafés and vending tend to offer treat-style foods; a wider range of healthy options should be made available
SARA BLEICH Associate professor of health policy • John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, US
bad at doing mental maths. This situation is at its worst among low-income, minority populations who are also at higher risk of obesity. Telling someone how many calories are in a particular item
“A
is only meaningful if they understand how many calories they need on a typical day. Most Americans will not be able to quickly divide the number of calories in a product into their daily needs and determine whether it represents a lot or a little of total required calories for the day. Saying a hamburger has 500 calories may not be meaningful for the average consumer. Giving consumers calorie information in easily understandable
ways – such as the miles of walking needed to burn off a particular item – will help them make better choices. We tried this in a low-income, predominantly black neighbourhood in Baltimore. We hung signs with calorie information on beverage cases in six corner stores, indicating that drinks had 250 calories, contained 16 teaspoons of sugar and would take 50 minutes of running or five miles of walking to burn off. As a result, people either bought smaller beverages or healthier drinks like water.
” February 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
mericans generally know little about calories or nutrition and are
NIC MULVANEY Creator • Calorific app
“T
he Calorific app is a simple, user- friendly way of educating people
about the calorie content of food. It compares a range of foods in 200-calorie portion sizes – showing how much of each you can eat for 200 calories – so people can easily cross-reference the calorie content, which is often confusing on food labelling stickers. People can quickly work out how many calories they are eating, or maybe substitute one snack or drink for another less calorific one. However, we do acknowledge that there’s more to nutrition
than calories alone. For example, milk and coke are similar in calories, but milk has far more nutritional value. The app has sparked debates on websites about whether people should even be counting calories, which is interesting. We did think about adding nutritional stickers to certain
foods, commenting on their vitamins and protein value, but we wanted to stick to the purity and simplicity of the idea. We liked the fact that we were just trying to do one thing. Calorie counting is just one part of fitness and nutrition and
we’re offering a tool, not something to live by. Calorific app is not trying to be the definitive guide to nutrition, but it does give some illuminating and useful information.
” Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital 29
PHOTO:
WWW.SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/GPOINTSTUDIO
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