Design of the Focus on Restaurant Engagement to Strengthen Health (FRESH) study: leveraging systems science to work with independently-owned restaurants to increase access to and promotion of healthful foods

Design of the Focus on Restaurant Engagement to Strengthen Health (FRESH) study: leveraging systems science to work with independently-owned restaurants to increase access to and promotion of healthful foods

Blog Article

BackgroundHigh dietary quality can protect against diet-related chronic diseases.In the United States, racial and ethnic minorities and those with lower incomes consistently exhibit lower dietary quality.Independently-owned restaurants are a common prepared food source in minority low-income communities, but there are significant knowledge gaps on how to work with these restaurants to offer healthy food, due to underlying and odyssey white hot putter 5 dynamic complexities associated with providing healthy food options.MethodsThe Focus on Restaurant Engagement to Strengthen Health (FRESH) study addresses this complex problem by leveraging systems science approaches to work with independently-owned restaurants.FRESH has two interrelated objectives: (1) to test impact on regular customer dietary quality via a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial in two low-income urban areas (Baltimore and the Washington DC metropolitan area), and (2) to use systems science approaches to develop, parameterize, and calibrate a simulation model.

The intervention is theory-and practice-based, comprising three phases: restaurant engagement, low-sugar beverages and healthy meals.The FRESH intervention will be implemented for 12 months in a total of 24 intervention and 24 comparison restaurants.The study is powered to detect a 5-point change in the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score of regular customers, which would signify a meaningful shift toward healthier eating patterns.DiscussionThe FRESH study will test a novel, multilevel, multisite intervention that aims to improve access to healthier prepared food options among small, independently-owned restaurants located in under-resourced settings.The design of the FRESH intervention and its evaluation are described, as well as plans for the development of a system dynamics simulation model for policymakers and other stakeholders to virtually test future restaurant-based auto rosvin interventions.

Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov, identifier, NCT05869149.