JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Society is facing multiple challenges, including lifestyle and age-related diseases of major public health relevance, which is of particular importance when both the general population and workforce are getting older. Moreover, global climate change and environmental degradation are major threats to our planet, thus, a sustainable lifestyle promoting healthy life choices and pro- environmental and climate behaviors should be encouraged and facilitated both in the workplace and society at large. The aim of the study is to investigate whether providing information about sustainable living encourages individuals to adopt more nutritious dietary habits and increase their levels of physical activity, as compared to receiving information solely centered around health-related recommendations for dietary intake and physical activity. This hypothesis will be tested among office workers to explore the workplace as an arena for health promotion. The Sustainable Office Intervention (SOFIA) is a two-arm cluster randomized participant- blinded trial that includes a multi-level sustainable lifestyle arm (experimental intervention) and a healthy lifestyle arm (control intervention). Both interventions are embedded in the theoretically-based Behavioral Change Wheel method and the intervention study last for approximately 8 weeks. A novel feature in this intervention study is to focus on changes in individual behavior as well as organizational factors and policies to facilitate or hinder sustainable and healthy lifestyles, respectivly. Through implementing a citizen science methodology, where the participants (i.e., citizen scientists) will collect data using the Stanford Our Voice Discovery Tool mobile application (app), be involved in analyzing the data, formulating a list of potential actions, and contacting managers they will bring about feasible changes in their workplace. In conclusion, given the ongoing climate change, negative environmental effects and the global epidemic of metabolic diseases, a sustainable lifestyle among office workers holds important potential to help counteract these trends. There is an urgent need to test the impact of a sustainable lifestyle on food intake, physical activity, and pro-environmental- and climate behaviors in a worksite-based randomized controlled trial. This study protocol responds to a societal need by addressing individual behavioral changes as well as environmental and organizational changes important for successful implementation of sustainable lifestyle habits in office settings.