Design and baseline characteristics of the Food4Me study : a web-based randomised controlled trial of personalised nutrition in seven European countries

Improving lifestyle behaviours has considerable potential for reducing the global burden of non-communicable diseases, promoting better health across the life-course and increasing well-being. However, realising this potential will require the development, testing and implementation of much more effective behaviour change interventions than are used conventionally. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a multi-centre, web-based, proof-of-principle study of personalised nutrition (PN) to determine whether providing more personalised dietary advice leads to greater improvements in eating patterns and health outcomes compared to conventional population-based advice. A total of 5,562 volunteers were screened across seven European countries; the first 1,607 participants who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were recruited into the trial. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the following intervention groups for a 6-month period: Level 0—control group—receiving conventional, non-PN advice; Level 1—receiving PN advice based on dietary intake data alone; Level 2—receiving PN advice based on dietary intake and phenotypic data; and Level 3—receiving PN advice based on dietary intake, phenotypic and genotypic data. A total of 1,607 participants had a mean age of 39.8 years (ranging from 18 to 79 years). Of these participants, 60.9 % were women and 96.7 % were from white-European background. The mean BMI for all randomised participants was 25.5 kg m−2, and 44.8 % of the participants had a BMI ≥ 25.0 kg m−2. Food4Me is the first large multi-centre RCT of web-based PN. The main outcomes from the Food4Me study will be submitted for publication during 2015.