« INTERVENTIONS AT WORKPLACE »

Health promotion at worksites can effectively increase intake of fruit and vegetables Bandoni and colleagues present an extensive intervention at twentynine worksites in Brazil, where they successfully increased the availability of fruit and vegetable by 49g per day. With a four stage ecological approach they developed a manual, involved the cafeteria managers in culinary workshops, distributed educational materials among employees, labelled the foods and put up posters to encourage healthy food habits.

A similar study from Denmark by Lassen and colleagues showed that it was possible to improve the diet of employees at blue-collar worksite during a six month participatory and empowerment-based intervention where they changed the nutritional environment in the cafeteria addressing both the individual and the environment levels. As in the Brazilian study the diet improved not only with regard to increased and significant intake of fruit and vegetables, but also a reduction in fat intake.

But how do you ensure that the effects of the interventions are sustained over time? Thorsen and colleagues offer one solution in their study, where empowering of the cafeteria managers and putting them in charge of monitoring the availability of fruit and vegetable, gave a sustained effect in a five-year follow-up. The average increase was 95g from baseline to the five-year follow-up resulting in mean intake on 208g fruit and vegetables per employees per meal per day.

The three studies are promising examples on how to use worksite intervention to improve availability of fruit and vegetables in the diets of employees.