Modelling population responses to workplace minimum dietary standards introduced as workers return after social...

Area of Science:

• Social and behavioral sciences
• Public health
• Computational modeling

Background:

• Dietary norms, often unhealthy, hinder food choice improvements in societies like the UK.
• COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted social eating interactions, impacting dietary norms.
• Re-establishing workplace social networks offers a chance to influence dietary norms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore how introducing minimum dietary standards in workplaces affects personal and social diet norms.
• To simulate changes in diet quality within a population using an agent-based model.
• To assess the impact of varying degrees of remote work on the effectiveness of dietary interventions.

Main Methods:

• An agent-based model simulating 1000 households was developed.
• The model tracked individual meal choices and diet quality (1-100) during agent interactions.
• Scenarios compared diet quality with and without minimum dietary standards, considering different work-from-home percentages.

Main Results:

• Increased workplace interaction amplified the positive impact of minimum dietary standards on diet norms.
• Socially isolated households were unaffected, but connected individuals showed significant diet quality improvements.
• A higher return-to-work rate correlated with greater population-wide diet quality changes.

Conclusions:

• Social connectivity is crucial for changing dietary norms through interventions.
• Workplace interventions can influence broader social networks and improve diet quality.
• Intervention effectiveness is contingent on population connectivity and setting diversity.