The technology centre Eurecat coordinates the international PANACEA project, that promotes the adoption of Mediterranean, healthy and sustainable eating habits in pregnant women from the second trimester until the baby’s first four months. The project integrates nutritional and culinary education, digital coaching tools, motivation strategies and initiatives to promote local consumption, with the aim of extending the benefits to the whole family.
To achieve this, PANACEA will implement a community intervention in two phases, combining components such as perinatal health, the Mediterranean diet, food sustainability and digital technologies.
The intervention will involve pregnant women and their family units, including partners, children and other relatives involved in childcare, with the aim of promoting changes in habits across the immediate family environment. By acting during pregnancy and early parenting, PANACEA seeks to lay the foundations for family routines that can be maintained over time.
In the first phase, the interventions will be co-designed with representatives from various sectors, including healthcare professionals, local farmers and producers, chefs and culinary experts, and community agents, to tailor the actions to the real needs of families and the context of each territory.
In a second phase, the tools developed will be tested in an intervention lasting almost eleven months in Spain, Italy and Egypt, with 420 women. This intervention will combine educational nutrition and cooking workshops, practical materials and behavioural support, through a digital app, motivational strategies and “farm-to-table” initiatives, to assess the impact of this integrated approach from a dietary perspective, as well as in behaviour and in the psychosocial, health and environmental spheres.
In Spain, the project will be implemented within the primary healthcare setting, led by healthcare professionals from the Sexual and Reproductive Health Care Center (ASSIR) in Reus, which is part of the Catalan Health Institute. The program, which aims to recruit approximately 140 pregnant women, will begin during the second trimester of pregnancy and continue until four months postpartum.
“We want to promote healthier and more sustainable food environments in families’ daily habits,” says Lorena Calderón, researcher at Eurecat’s Nutrition and Health Technology Unit and project coordinator.
The study will run from the second trimester of pregnancy until four months after delivery, “so that improvements in adherence to the Mediterranean diet and in the adoption of sustainable habits, such as, for example, the choice of Mediterranean, organic and locally sourced foods,” says Antoni Caimari, Director of the Biotechnology Area at Eurecat.
In addition to participating in the multicentre intervention, Eurecat will develop PANACEA’s digital and behaviour-change support solutions, which will be based on an artificial intelligence-driven behavioural recommendation engine and a digital coach developed by the technology centre.
Furthermore, Eurecat will implement new food classification systems based on the analysis of foods’ environmental and nutritional life cycles. It also will carry out the assessment of the nutritional and environmental performance of the diets followed by the volunteer participants.
The PANACEA project, which is co-funded through the PRIMA programme and coordinated by the technology centre Eurecat, has an interdisciplinary consortium of twelve partners, three of which are based in Catalonia: the University Institute Foundation for Primary Health Care Research Jordi Gol i Gurina, Reus City Council, and Eurecat. The initiative brings together actors from research, innovation, education, business, public bodies and non-governmental organisations.
