JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Society faces multiple challenges, including lifestyle- and age-related diseases, global climate change, and environmental degradation. A sustainable lifestyle combines healthy life choices with pro-environmental behaviors, defined as actions that minimize environmental harm and combat climate change, to benefit both human- and planetary health.

Objective:

This pilot intervention study aim to test if office workers receiving healthy lifestyle education embedded in the context of sustainable development show greater positive changes in dietary and physical activity behaviors, as well as diet-related carbon footprint, compared to office workers receiving education focused solely on healthy behaviors. The study also evaluated the participants' goal setting as well as perceived facilitators and barriers for behavior change.

Methods:

A two-armed participant-blinded cluster randomized study including an experimental intervention arm (sustainable lifestyle, n =19) and a control intervention arm (healthy lifestyle, n =14) was conducted in Sweden. The study lasted 8 weeks and included 6 workplace-based workshops and was based on the behavioral change wheel and the socio-ecological model to facilitate behavior change.

Results:

The reduction of total diet-related carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) was 0.8 kg and 0.4 kg per day for the sustainable and healthy arm, respectively. Also, there was statically significant interaction between time and lifestyle when the carbon footprint was expressed as a qualitative measure, i.e. CO2e kg per 1000 kcal per day (P = 0.046). Moreover, the intake of vitamin C, a marker for fruits and vegetables, increased with 8.0 and 12.5 mg per 1000 kcal per day for the sustainable and healthy arm, respectively. In addition, total sedentary time decreased by 0.4 hours per day in the sustainable arm, but not in the healthy arm. This indicates that the educational workshops in respective arms, had different impacts on health behavior over time. In total, participants formulated 22 diet-related goals that were categorized into nine groups, and they reported eight barriers along with five facilitators to achieve the desired behavior change.

Conclusions:

This study suggests that embedding healthy lifestyle recommendations within a sustainable development context may be an efficient way to reduce carbon footprint and increase healthy behavior among office workers. Given the ongoing global epidemic of metabolic diseases, climate change, environmental degradation, and promoting a sustainable lifestyle in a workplace context has the potential to counteract these trends. Clinical Trial: This pilot study has been registered retrospectively as a full-scale clinical trial on ClinicalTrials.gov (ID no. NCT06698094).