Effects of Physical Activity Calorie Equivalent Labelling on Hot Drink Vending Transactions

Summary

Food nutritional labels are one way to support people to make more informed, healthier food choices. However, there is limited evidence from trials showing that nutrition information on food or drinks is changing the food purchasing or food/beverage consumption behaviours. Many people do not understand the meaning of kilocalories (kcals, calories) or grams of fat displayed on food labels, and often underestimate the number of calories when labelling is not provided. An alternative or complementary approach to current nutrition labelling, is to provide calorie information with a clear interpretation of what the calorie content of the food item/meal or beverage means in terms of energy expenditure. This approach has been called physical activity calorie equivalent (or expenditure) labelling (PACE), which aims to show the public how many minutes (or miles/kilometres) of physical activity (e.g. walking or running) are equivalent to the calories contained in food/beverages. For example, "the calories in this chocolate bar require 95 minutes of walking to burn off". One context in which the public consume a lot of calories is from vending machines. We hypothesise that providing consumers with PACE information on hot beverage vending machines will reduce the average number of calories per transaction dispensed from the vending machines compared with when no PACE information/labelling is presented on vending machines. The study will adopt what is called a stepped wedge randomised controlled trial design involving 42 hot beverage vending machines in 27 buildings (clusters). Clusters will be randomly allocated to one of eight sequences across 24 weeks, which will dictate the time (weeks) at which clusters display the vending machine PACE labelling intervention. Weeks one to four will constitute a baseline period, during which the data will be collected from all vending machines without PACE labelling in place. This will be followed by 20 weeks during which the PACE labelling intervention will be introduced and maintained at each building according to a stepped wedge design (Figure 2). Specifically, every two weeks, three or four clusters will move to the intervention condition. The number of transactions from the vending machines will be collected over the study period and we will compare the number of transactions in the weeks when the PACE labelling is displayed compared to when it was not.

Conditions

• Averaged Kilocalories Per Beverage Transaction
• Proportion of Total High Calorie Beverages
• Total Number of Beverage Transactions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Physical activity calorie equivalent labelling

Physical activity calorie equivalent labelling on beverage vending machines

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Loughborough University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Amanda Daley, PhD · Loughborough University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-10-30

Primary Completion

2024-05-31

Completion

2024-05-31

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations