Durham County Council employees are receiving free fruit at work as part of a study run by the EU Isafruit project.
The scheme started this week and is being led by researchers at Newcastle University and the Technical University of Denmark. Its stated aim is to see if fruit can boost the fitness of the workforce.
Some 500 volunteers from the council have been recruited and for the next six months half of them will receive two free pieces of fruit a day while the control group continues with its usual diet. Important indicators such as weight, waist size and blood pressure will all be measured and the study will look at sick days taken, staff morale and productivity.
Professor Chris Seal, who is leading the project at Newcastle University said: “We all know how much fruit and vegetables we should be eating a day, but many of us still don’t do it. When you ask people why they don’t, the two most common answers are cost and availability. This initiative overcomes both these problems.
“The idea is that if people have easy access to, say, an apple or banana, then fruit will replace the less healthy snacks which so many of us reach for when we take a coffee break.”
Isafruit has dubbed this latest piece of research the Fruit at Work Study. It will not only examine the individual health benefits of eating more fruit, but measure the cost-effectiveness to an employer of offering free fruit to staff.
Over the next six months, the experimental group at Durham will consume an extra 20 tonnes of fruit. Although the study is the first of its kind in the UK, In Denmark, for example many employers are already convinced of the benefits of offering free fresh produce to their employees and free fruit at work is provided by more than 60 per cent of companies.
Charlotte Bryant, a research nutritionist at Newcastle University and co-ordinator of the ISAFRUIT project in the UK, explained: “We’re not asking people in the control group to stop eating fruit - if they would normally have an apple at coffee time then that’s fine.
“What we’re interested in is increasing people’s consumption of fruit and the effect that might have on their health.”
