Trial of personalised advice to aid weight loss
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Trial of personalised advice to aid weight loss
IRAS ID
283149
Contact name
Philip Calder
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Southampton
ISRCTN Number
ISRCTN51509551
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Obesity is a common condition. Obesity has physical, psychological and social penalties. Furthermore, obesity increases the risk of developing health problems, including heart disease, type-2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and several common cancers. Obesity results from an intake of energy in excess of energy expenditure. However, obesity is complex and involves the interactions of many different factors, including genetics, metabolism, eating behaviour, physical activity and some non-biological factors. Individuals with overweight or “modest” obesity are typically advised to change their diet, lowering energy intake, and do more exercise. This can work to some extent. Some individuals become more motivated through more personal and/or technology-based interventions and studies show these can induce bigger improvements in obesity outcomes than the more traditional approach. Personalisation of interventions may be effective in changing behaviour. Individuals may also need prompting to modify their dietary and lifestyle habits for such approaches to be successful. We plan to compare general advice from a dietitian (group 1) with more personalised advice in individuals with overweight/obesity (groups 2 and 3) to see if the effect on various outcomes is different. The personalised advice will be of two types: a) (group 2) advice generated by the integration of data on each individual’s diet, metabolic profile and other biomarkers, and a number of genetic polymorphisms and provided to the dietitian through an app; and b) (group 3) the same as in group 2 but with additional behaviour change prompts delivered to participants through the app. It is hypothesied that those in the personalized nutrition groups will show greater effects on measures of body fatness, metabolic profile, inflammatory markers and other outcomes compared to group 1. It is further hypothesized that those receiving the behaviour change prompts will show the greatest improvements in these outcomes.
REC name
East Midlands - Leicester Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/EM/0297
Date of REC Opinion
16 Feb 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion