Healthy eating top of menu on DietPhone app

WANT to lose weight? There's an app for that. In all the things your mobile phone can help you with, healthy eating is now among them.

• Not just an apple a day: The app is also available on average mobiles

Scottish researchers have developed the DietPhone application to help make it easier to collect detailed information and monitor food intake.

They believe it will help people control their eating habits, improve their health and free up time for dieticians and doctors to see more patients.

The team behind the app, from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, believes it could also help people with eating disorders such as anorexia, and be useful for weight-conscious sportspeople.

The DietPhone programme, which can be downloaded onto an average mobile, contains information on around 2,000 items of food and 10,000 portion sizes. After each meal or snack, the app user records what they have eaten through a drop-down phone menu.

The data is then sent to a central computer where it can be analysed by a doctor or nutritionist, who can then provide feedback.

Senior lecturer and researcher Michael Clapham said: "Collecting dietary intake information from individuals is extremely time consuming, costly and complicated. People usually fill in a diet diary for between three to seven days which involves writing down descriptions of what food has been eaten and how much.

"This then has to be delivered to a dietician or nutritionist who has to painstakingly go through the paperwork to analyse the results. Often, due to embarrassment and lack of time, the food intake is not recorded accurately."

Clapham said some mobile phone products were already available to help people monitor their diets, but the information they provided was usually limited to calorie and fat content.

"We have expanded that greatly so you get the zinc, the iron, selenium, vitamin A and B vitamins," he said.

"That is way too much information for the normal person on the street. So what we are doing is that the person has the information on their phone, that comes up on the dietician's or the GP's website so when you go to their clinic, they have what you have been eating and they can discuss that with you."

Clapham said the DietPhone app should help GPs work more efficiently.

"If you are given a booklet to fill in, or the dietician interviews you, it could take 15 minutes. GPs don't have that time or skill. They are not going to sit you down and do a complete diet history.

"But if it flips up on their screen, that is much easier."

He said the app could also be used in patients with diseases where diet is important, such as coeliac disease, cystic fibrosis, diabetes and cancer.

Ken Aitchison, the technical researcher involved in the development of the app, also said the technology had the ability to help the overstretched NHS deal with diet-related illness."We see huge potential for the NHS to use DietPhone to allow more people to benefit from specialist dietary advice," he said.

"Not only could this technology be used to assist Scotland deal with some of its most significant health problems, the simple technology has the potential to improve the health of different groups on a global scale."

The university aims to start work with a Scottish health board on the DietPhone.

Carina Norris, a Fife-based nutritionist, said: "There are a lot of problems with getting people to complete diet diaries. They lose them, they get bored. But most people are not going to lose their phones as they do their diaries."