Abstract
Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine crumbs: daily food challenges completed by consuming one food that meets the challenge. We examine crumbs through developing and deploying the iPhone application Food4Thought. In a 3-week field study with 61 participants, crumbs supported engagement and mindfulness while offering opportunities to learn about food. Our 2×2 study compared nutrition versus non-nutrition crumbs coupled with social versus non-social features. Nutrition crumbs often felt more purposeful to participants, but non-nutrition crumbs increased mindfulness more than nutrition crumbs. Social features helped sustain engagement and were important for engagement with non-nutrition crumbs. Social features also enabled learning about the variety of foods other people use to meet a challenge.
Highlights
Interventions such as reminders, tips, or challenges, are a popular and effective method for promoting a variety of aspects of well-being [11,35]
Mindfulness (RQ3b) Participants in the nutrition-social condition experienced a decrease in identification of food distractions (Table 5b Social*Nutrition, 95% CI 0.09-1.41 decrease)
Participants in the social condition further learned through discussion on their posts and by seeing others post in the Facebook group about what foods completed a crumb: “My favorite ones were... the Vitamin D ones and the 'eat something low on the glycemic index,' I guess those are two things I didn't know much about” (S+N+7)
Summary
Interventions such as reminders, tips, or challenges, are a popular and effective method for promoting a variety of aspects of well-being [11,35]. AND MOTIVATION Many people seek to improve their diet in some way, and many approaches have been developed to help people in this general goal. In developing and evaluating crumbs and Food4Thought, we were motivated by research on the benefits and challenges of food journaling, the benefits of increased food mindfulness, and the potential of daily goals and social features to promote engagement. Mobile food tracking applications have more recently become available, and many people prefer them to paper diaries [8]
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