Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization (CSIRO) which is an Australian National Science Agancy has collaborated with Hort Innovation and SP Health to create an app calld CSIRO's VegEze to harness smartphone app technology to help Australians eating more veggies.
According to CSIRO recent research, every two in three Australian or as many as 19 million Australians don't meet the dietary guidelines (1). But can this app help people to achieve five serves of fruits and vegetable daily? What are some of the factors that stopping them and how can we deal with it? Dr. Gilly Henrie is one of CSIRO's scientist explain about this app.
According to CSIRO's media release (2), "Since May 2015, CSIRO has studied the dietary habits of more than 191,000 adults for its Healthy Diet Score research by eating three types of vegetables as part of the evening meal was found to be a key marker in having a better diet."
"It is a 21 days challenge to have 3 different type of veggies each night. It is a novel approach like game to reward for achievers. It also has a tool within the app to do veggies tracker to track their progress, to motivate and do fun meal as well as there are some recipes in app for people to try. And it is available in app store," said Dr. Henrie.
Listen to full interview here: 
Can it really help Australians to eat more veggies?
VegEze app-Rewards-CSIRO Source: CSIRO
"From the preliminary result of four thousand people who have participated this research study, we found 80% of people achieved 3 different type of veggies each night at the end of day 21. It seems to work well for men and people hate veggies and obese adults. Men have increased by half a third, men were able to increase consumption by 3 quarter of the third over 21 days, proportion of people meet veg guidelines significantly increased. We are quite happy because some time people are hard to reach these health and nutrition initiative. So its quite exciting, but we still collecting data so they are just preliminary finding," Dr. Gilly Henrie asserted.
Dr. Gilly Henrie believes this app could be one of the solutions to encourage Australians to consume more vegetables.
Dr. Henrie claimed "I think there is no one solution, we will fix it, dietary is a very complicated matter but this is a novel approach. Hopefully it is fresh and exciting for people to motivate to start their health kick. I mean with vegetable particular 95% of Australian aren't eating enough each day and we need to have five serves a day. So for whatever reasons we find eating enough veggies is quite hard, its hard habits to maintain, so hopefully VegEze is one approach that might help some people within Australian communities."
VegEze app- A serve of viggie-CSIRO Source: CSIRO
"There are different reasons, sometimes they are around knowing what to do with them, how to prepare them, wasting them, the cost, the availability and then some people's taste is a barrier as well, i.e we have tips and tricks to help with simple meals and dishes to gourmet. Some of these are perceived as barrier, once you've got the confidence to overcome some of them, you will have more confidence to explore and and buy different types of veggies. You will use all of them either in pantries or fridge. So you can make something out of it, but they need to overcome these barrier."
Furthermore, CSIRO maintained that there are also another 3 main barriers that preventing Australia from eating more veggies for instance, "low awareness, lack of time and low confidence (2)".
Professor Manny Noakes, a Senior Principal Research Scientist from CSIRO said that:
"After just a few weeks using the app every day, users should feel more confident in adding more vegetables to their menu and notice some positive changes to their health and well-being. The beneficial nutrients and fibre from vegetables can help improve digestion, and fill you up – which can help reduce eating too much unhealthy junk food."
This VegEze has been trialed for a year but do people really know about it?
"It's available in app store and sometimes people wanting to embark on health initiative might stumble across it within app store, but we definitely hoping that more people engage and download the app and sort of embrace this technology approach to try to change their dietary habit," said Dr. Henrie.
VegEze app-Recipes-CSIRO Source: CSIRO
"At the moment it is just available in iOS, so in apple device, just until we understand which features are working, how we could improve it, which aspects people like or don't like. Once we got that feedback, we are going to release android version very soon."
Here is what Dr. Gilly Henrie a CSIRO's scientist want to say to Australian communities.
"I mean from the app, yeah we've got a simple and easy message to do three at dinner, so try to have 3 different types of vegetables at dinner. Don't worry to much about the technicality how you prepare it, how much etc., but if you can increase your varieties, it is very good first step to increase the amount of vegetable that you are having."
Does this app really help?
Dr. Gilly Henrie mentioned that "Yeah so the study, we measure people at 21 days and 90 days to see if we are able sort of maintain this habit that they developed within 21 days. The supports you get from the app is hopefully giving enough confident to motivation to keep going and has this sort of healthy habit, but that is part of the research really to find out how they are able to maintain their habit longer term."
But can this app also be beneficial to children as well?
"This app is focusing on adults and we are definitely interested and thinking about how we can modify for more family based approach. So with young children we know that parents are still the gate keepers to their nutrition, and so how can we include kids in the app in the fun way to get them involve. But at the moment it is just for adults, but there is no recipes for kids. it is parents or adults choose to make recipes for their families. That's fantastic."#
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