World Health Organization European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases, Special Initiative on NCDs and Innovation, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing, Kingston University London, Kingston upon Thames, London KT1 2EE, UK.
Nutrients. 2023 Sep 6;15(18):3887. doi: 10.3390/nu15183887.
The rapidly growing field of digital meal delivery platforms has transformed the out of home (OOH) food environment, presenting both opportunities and challenges for public health. This paper introduces the development and potential of a novel digital platform designed for monitoring the OOH food environment. Drawing on publicly available data from meal delivery applications, this platform provides valuable insights into the landscape of digital food offerings, such as the most common restaurants per region, average caloric content per meal type, and energy value per monetary unit. This research addresses the current void in regulations for this digital environment, particularly around food labeling and provision of nutrition information. Even though the platform has significantly improved our understanding of the digital food ecosystem, it highlights gaps, primarily due to the lack of publicly available individual data and inconsistencies in provided information. Despite these challenges, the proposed digital platform holds considerable promise for better understanding the digital food environment, supporting healthier food choices, and informing future policy interventions aimed at regulating the online food environment. This research advocates for mandatory regulations in the digital food sector to ensure comprehensive, comparable, and transparent nutrition information and equality in access to nutritious foods.
快速发展的数字送餐平台领域改变了户外（OOH）食品环境，为公共卫生带来了机遇和挑战。本文介绍了一种新型数字平台的开发和潜力，该平台旨在监测户外食品环境。该平台利用送餐应用程序中公开可用的数据，深入了解数字食品供应的情况，例如每个地区最常见的餐厅、每种类别餐的平均卡路里含量以及每货币单位的能量值。这项研究解决了当前数字环境监管方面的空白，特别是在食品标签和提供营养信息方面。尽管该平台极大地提高了我们对数字食品生态系统的理解，但它突出了差距，主要是由于缺乏公开可用的个人数据和提供信息的不一致性。尽管存在这些挑战，但拟议的数字平台在更好地理解数字食品环境、支持更健康的食品选择以及为监管在线食品环境的未来政策干预提供信息方面具有很大的潜力。这项研究主张在数字食品领域制定强制性法规，以确保全面、可比和透明的营养信息以及获取营养食品的平等机会。
