Centrum's Nutri Coach: Your Personal Dietician

Ever wonder how much nutrients you get on our daily meals? Well, from our most-trusted multivitamin-mineral brand comes a savvy nutrient counter that can help us maintain a good diet and know something about the food that we take - the Centrum Nutri Coach.

A first in the country, this nutrition tracker tailor-fit to the Filipino lifestyle and diet application can be found only at www.centrum.com.ph. And last September 26 at the Mind Museum in Taguig City, together with its latest brand ambassador, Mikael Daez, Centrum presented this latest innovation that is geared to promote healthy lifestyle.

Mikael Daez

The Centrum Nutri Coach allows us to indicate exactly what we ate from a variety of food choices that include our Filipino favorites such as inihaw na pork chop and halo-halo into this “virtual” plate. It also takes into consideration other traditional components of health and nutrition like level of physical activity and age. All this information will then be used to compute for your general state of nutrition and give you tips on how to improve your nutritional habits.

The launch of the Centrum Nutri Coach comes on the heels of the research study done by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) which showed that an alarming 70% of Filipino households don’t get the prescribed amount of most vitamins and minerals they need.

In a presentation showed to us by Professor Liezl Atienza, Institution of Human Nutrition and Food, College of Human Ecology, University of the Philippines - Los Banos, shockingly, despite of the said information above, there's an increase in incidence of obesity and being overweight among Filipinos.

Professor Liezl Atienza

The poor eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle of Filipinos is not giving them the vitamins and minerals they need, which actually lead to what is known as the “double burden of disease.” An upsurge in non-communicable disease risk factors like obesity and overweight, in addition to the existing issues of infectious diseases and under nutrition.

She also indicated in her presentation that Filipinos are eating less and less vegetables. Based on food consumption surveys, Filipinos on average are eating less and less vegetables per day in the last three decades. From 145 grams per day of vegetables in 1978, consumption has decreased to 110 grams per day in 2008. And this low fruits and vegetable consumption is sadly leading us to deficiencies in intakes of calcium, iron, thiamine riboflavin, niacin and vitamins folic acid, Vitamins A , C and E.

With all of these health issues, Centrum hopes that with the creation of Nutri Coach, they are not just making nutrition just easy and accessible to everyone, but also fun. Because for the first time, we can actually have a hand in keeping track of our food intake, we can choose to be healthy.

Joy Ong

Pfizer Brand Manager for Centrum

So how does this Centrum Nutri Coach works?

Upon visiting www.centrum.com.ph, you will be asked to input factors like your age, weight and level of physical activity into the Nutri Coach website. These factors are important in gauging how much vitamins and/or minerals you need.

Then from a menu of different Filipino foods, you will choose what you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner - and since again, this is made for Filipinos, there's merienda too! The system will automatically compute the nutrients you are getting from your food choices and will show you your gap versus the recommended daily intake for Filipinos.

It will even propose a sample meal plan for you to follow so you can get enough of the vitamins and minerals you lack with your current diet. The Centrum Nutri Coach was designed to make it easy for users to navigate. Users have the option to choose pre-set meals that fit their usual food intake if they don’t want to use the customize option where they can choose the actual food items that they usually eat. Various types of eating habits were captured in the Pre-set meals such as High Fiber, High Calorie, Low Calorie, High Carbohydrate, Low Protein, Low Carbohydrate or High Protein.

Food servings vary per food type. For instance, pizza serving is 1 slice, butter is 1 teaspoon, while coffee is 1 cup. The usual food serving as noted by the nutritionists were used as a guide. Serving details per food item are specified in the Nutri Coach.

Once you picked the kind of food that you partake, Centrum Nutri Coach will show you the nutrients you get from your food choices and if you are getting the right level of nutrients base on the daily Recommended Energy and Nutrient Intake. Other information you’ll get are your BMI, calorie consumption plus your ideal weight and height. A sample diet will also be provided in the results page.

The Centrum Nutri Coach considers our age, height, weight, gender, activity level and health condition which includes women who are pregnant. Though, as of now, it is juts available for 19 years old and above.

Centrum worked with nutritionists to compute for the vitamins and minerals per food item for the Nutri Coach to give a credible and helpful results. The reference used was the Food Composition Table shared by FNRI (Food and Nutrition Research Institute of the Philippines).