Giving on-line shoppers the chance to choose a lower fat option for a food increased lower fat choices. What’s more, people continued to make the lower fat choices on subsequent shopping occasions.

Of 500 on-line shoppers, when they selected a food item for which there was a lower fat option, they were shown a pop-up of the alternative, enabling them to choose this instead, if they wished.  A high percentage of the consumers studied did so. What’s more they continued to do so on subsequent shopping occasions. The saturates content of their basket reduced by 10%.  For details, see today’s BBC news (website - 25/9/06).

As an increasing number of people are shopping on-line, help in choosing healthier food choices is a great way of improving the population’s overall diet.  The study reported only studied fat content, so further work is needed to examine the effects on other nutrients.

Further research along the following lines could be done:

A population sample could be randomly-allocated to on-line shopping or in store grocery shopping for, say, three months. On-line shoppers could be offered healthier food choices when one exists for an item selected, e.g. a food which is, say, lower in fat, saturates, sugar or salt. In-store shoppers would be helped to make healthier food choices by means of nutrition labels on pack and the FSA front of pack traffic light panel showing fat, saturates, sugar and salt content. Nutrient intakes would be calculated at the beginning and at the end of the study in order to examine the changes made in each group and to ascertain whether there is a difference between on-line and in-store shopping.

Nutrient intakes could be calculated from food intake questionnaire, 24-hour recall (telephone interview on 3, unannounced, occasions) or 3-day food intake record. This would enable the effects on intakes of many nutrients to be investigated, not just those of prime interest.