Callanan and McCartney, 2016
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High blood pressure is one of the leading causes of heart disease and stroke. Even though high blood pressure affects more than half of us after the age of fifty, many people are unaware that their blood pressure is higher than it should be. The good news is that improving your diet can make a real difference. This study evaluated the MyDietScore dietary assessment app which has been designed to help people lower their blood pressure. The app measures the overall quality of the user's diet and provides personalised dietary advice that's effective, practical, safe and easy to follow.
Unlike many diet apps and programmes that focus mainly on calorie counting or rapid weight loss, the MyDietScore app assesses the overall quality of your diet by examining the foods and eating habits which have the greatest influence on blood pressure. It measures how closely your diet follows established healthy eating principles across six key dietary domains that are vital to blood pressure control: fruit and vegetables, dairy foods, fish, salt intake, alcohol consumption and nutritional supplements. These dietary domains are important because together they provide many of the vitamins, minerals and other dietary factors which influence blood pressure, including beneficial nutrients like potassium, calcium, magnesium and omega-3 oils. The app converts information provided by the user into an easy-to-understand dietary quality score, enabling the person to see how well their current eating habits support healthy blood pressure control.
The app does more than simply measure diet quality however. After completing the dietary assessment, users receive personalised dietary advice based on their current eating habits. This tailored feedback identifies areas where dietary improvements can be made and provides practical recommendations that are realistic to introduce into everyday life. Rather than encouraging restrictive dieting, the programme helps people to improve the nutritional quality of their diet to better meet their recommended intake targets. This makes the advice both safe and sustainable for long-term health.
The six-week evaluation of the MyDietScore blood pressure app yielded very impressive results. Participants who completed the programme experienced an average reduction in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading) of more than 7mm Hg. For context here, each 2mm Hg sustained reduction in blood pressure is usually associated with a ~10% reduction in the risk of stroke. Many participants with raised blood pressure at the beginning of the study also reduced their blood pressure to healthy levels by the end of the programme. Participants also experienced small but significant reductions in body weight, body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference, showing that improved diet quality can simultaneously support healthy weight management as well as enhanced blood pressure control.
Apart from improving the overall quality of participants' diets, an additional benefit of the programme was that it enhanced participants' understanding of key healthy eating principles. Participants' overall dietary quality scores and their dietary knowledge scores both increased substantially during the programme, demonstrating that the app can reliably teach, guide and support users towards positive changes in eating behaviour that significantly benefit their blood pressure and health over time.
Overall, this research shows that the MyDietScore app provides a safe, effective, reliable and practical way to assess and improve the overall quality of the diet for better blood pressure control. By accurately scoring the foods and dietary habits that most influence blood pressure and by providing personalised, evidence-based advice, the MyDietScore app can help people lower their blood pressure, manage their body weight, improve their nutritional intake and reduce their long-term risk of heart disease and stroke while still meeting their vitamin, mineral and other nutrient intake targets.