By Lauren Otis,Staff Writer
You and your wife are deciding whether to eat at a restaurant in downtown Princeton. Outside the entrance you both get on your cell phones. Your wife’s tells her the poached salmon special has plenty of the vitamin D she needs presently, served with a whole grain that provides extra fiber. Yours tells you to indulge in the boeuf bourguignon, which the restaurant prepares using vegetable broth and little bacon, a plus for your cholesterol count.
You both decide this is the place, appetites whetted, and with the good feeling of knowing the dishes you will order meet your specific dietary health needs as well as your tastes.
This scenario of matching personal dietary profiles with cell-phone technology in the service of encouraging healthy dining habits will soon be tested by 15 participating Princeton restaurants under a pilot program developed by the Princeton Borough-based company Viocare.
Since 1993, Viocare has sought to utilize technology to encourage healthy living habits, with VioDine — as the cell-phone restaurant application is called — the latest of its projects to this end, said Rick Weiss, Viocare’s founder and president and a Princeton Township resident.
Viocare is currently the administrator of the Princeton Living Well program and Web site, which enables participating individuals to earn “points” for healthy activities which they can then redeem for “rewards” with participating Princeton merchants.
VioDine is an attempt to bring healthy personalized nutritional habits out of the home and into the realm of restaurants, encouraging diners to choose menu items that improve their health, and ultimately providing restaurants with an incentive to offer healthier choices to diners, said Mr. Weiss, who was an applied researcher at Squibb, Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corp. before founding his own company.
”My passion has been fitness and health and nutrition, partly from my wife who taught nutrition in high school for 25 years in Jackson,” Mr. Weiss said. An avid cyclist, Mr. Weiss described learning firsthand “that I could improve my performance in my sport by just changing my nutrition.”
The concept behind VioDine is simple: “If we could know that someone is at a specific restaurant and know what is at that restaurant, could we provide assistance to that person in making a healthier choice in what they eat,” Mr. Weiss said.
With a $200,000 grant from the federal National Cancer Institute, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, Viocare will commence a six-month VioDine pilot project, Mr. Weiss said. He said he has a goal of signing up 15 restaurants that will each have four menu items professionally analyzed for nutritional content as part of the project.
Currently, 10 restaurants are confirmed participants: The Original SoupMan, Olive’s Cafe, Tico’s, Alchemist & Barrister, Cox’s Market, Calico Grill, Yankee Doodle Tap Room, Mediterra, Teresa Caffe, and Eno Terra. Two other restaurants are close to committing, Mr. Weiss said.
Using VioDine, diners will be matched “with one or more of the menu options that will fit them best, and hopefully this is a way for them to eat healthily,” Mr. Weiss said.
Mr. Weiss said he will begin recruiting the nine individuals to participate in the pilot soon. A personalized nutritional profile will be created for each individual, what they need to eat to be healthiest, and each will carry a special smart-phone. Using GPS technology, their individually created nutritional profiles, and the nutritional analyses of the Princeton restaurant menu items, participants will be able to identify good dining choices literally on the spot, he said.
The idea is born of the knowledge that personalized information is more effective than general guidelines for improving people’s dining habits.
”There is a ton of research, when you personalize behavioral feedback they will actually do something to improve their health,” Mr. Weiss said.
While in the past someone could only follow general nutritional guidelines for selecting a meal at a restaurant, the use of current mobile technologies allows them to obtain the kind of personalized and accurate advice they will hopefully act on, he said.
Because of its intelligent, health-oriented community, and enlightened restaurants interested in serving them, Princeton is “a perfect place” for the VioDine feasibility study, Mr. Weiss said. Ultimately, if the mobile personalized nutrition concept proves beneficial — improving eating habits in measurable ways — it can be replicated elsewhere, particularly in poor and urban communities where healthy dining, and healthy dining options, are lacking, he said.
The cell-phone technology is flexible, Mr. Weiss said, and could be applied beyond restaurants, helping shoppers identify healthier brands at grocery stores for instance.
”I am very optimistic,” he said.
Viocare’s next goal is to “work with our partners on creating something that is very engaging and fun” for diners to use, he said.
Ultimately, Mr. Weiss hopes VioDine will be another weapon in Viocare’s arsenal as it seeks to create a “wellness ecosystem,” in Princeton and beyond.
”It is one of those misnomers, people think they need to do dramatic things to become healthier, it is just a matter of taking one step after another,” he said.
”I want to get to the point where Princeton is thought of the same way as Boulder, Colorado, Davis, California and Madison, Wisconsin,” Mr. Weiss said, communities with national reputations for healthy lifestyles and quality of life.
For more information, go to www.viocare.com and www.princetonlivingwell.com.
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Staff photo by Mark CzajkowskiRick Weiss of Viocare and company employees demonstrate their potential new phone app outside Mediterra in Palmer Square. From left are: Lisa Cohen, David Blankenbush, Diena Seeger, Mr. Weiss, Carol Feiveson, Time Gerdes, Marnie Levinson and Ming Lu.
