SuperTracker a new Worksite Wellness App

The USDA's new App the SuperTracker for worksite wellness
The USDA’s new App the SuperTracker for worksite wellness

This month we celebrate Workplace Wellness Week. Just in time, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) has created a new worksite wellness toolkit called the SuperTracker.

What is the SuperTracker?

This is an online toolkit (both available on the phone or tablet) which tracks recipes, calorie intake, activity and weight management. The App’s content is based on the USDA’s Dietary Guideline’s for Americans and Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

The Super Tracker toolkit includes an 8 week promotion plan to have a structured wellness goals in place.

 5 Features of the SuperTracker App

  • Food-A-Pedia: Look up nutrition information for over 8000 foods and compare foods side-by-side.
  • Food Tracker: Track food intake
  • Physical Activity Tracker: Record number of minutes each week of exercsie
  • My weight manager: decide to maintain or lose weight- enter your weight and track your progress
  • My Top 5 Goals: Create 5 goals of wellness.
  • My Recipes: Search for healthy recipes in resources recipe books and find out nutrition data for them.

Wellness Goals

After you put in your data (age, height ,activity and register) you can set a maximum of 5 wellness goals.  You can also opt for virtual coaching reminders daily, weekly or monthly. This is what I chose:

  1. Weight control – maintain a healthy weight
  2. food groups- I chose to increase my fruit servings to 2C a day
  3. activity- I chose to get 300 minutes a week
  4. I need to stick to about 2000 calories a day
  5. Meet a target for calcium with 3 servings of dairy a day

Comments

Personally, having this App on my phone will help me keep track of exercise , my fruit servings and calcium requirements. Not sure if I have time to plug in everything I eat though- but I do like the journal feature to be able to record food intake quickly and assess a day’s intake overall.

This App may be an easy way to promote health and wellness in the workplace. Workplace wellness has shown to decrease employee health care costs, reduce absenteeism, increase productivity and overall moral.Keeping the objectives simple, making the wellness goals personal and manageable means success for companies and their employees.

 

Reference:

Leone, A., Celebrate National Workplace Wellness Week Using the Worksite Wellness Toolkit , Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. April, 2015, p.497