Healthy building design strategies for nutrition & hydration
Healthy Building Interiors That Promote Nutrition & Hydration
Just like adequate sleep and regular movement, nutrition and hydration play a key role in human health, meaning healthy building consultants need to consider how these elements of the building occupant experience will be affected by architectural, engineering and facilities management decisions made during the construction or refurbishment process.
While there are of course any number of external socio-cultural and psychological influences at play in occupant health, a building’s interiors can indeed should play a positive role in promoting healthy habits and behaviors. The leading healthy building standard ‘WELL’ even has an entire section devoted to the subject.
So how can healthy building consultants positively impact nutrition and hydration in particular for residents, office workers and students? The design of a healthy building should seamlessly integrate design strategies, policies and practices to encourage positive behavioral change.
The availability of healthy food choices and adequate numbers of filtered water stations on each floor can go a long way in this sense but we can go well beyond that into the layout of eating spaces, what is known as ‘strategic dining design’, educational signage and promotional messaging, the specification of rooftop gardens and vegetable boxes, even policies that specify the local sourcing of ingredients used in canteens, or healthy snack options in vending machines, for example.
Mindful Eating Spaces and Strategic Dining Design in Healthy Buildings
The design and layout of eating spaces in a healthy building as well as access to specific types of food and beverage options can have a tangible impact on occupant dietary choices over the long-term.
For example, communal eating spaces help to encourage a more mindful approach to eating, as well as social engagement, as opposed to eating alone in front of the TV say.
The WELL building standard is particularly committed to this idea of designated places for food intake as a key driver of overall occupant mental health and wellbeing.
Design of eating areas in healthy buildings
In addition, the WELL standard encourages designating eating times to increase the likelihood that people will eat in groups and reap the full benefits of a shared, collective experience one or more times each day (see WELL Nutrition section).
Within healthy buildings, several other wellness interior design strategies can be put in place to promote nutrition and hydration further.
For example, eating away from home in an office or educational environment is often associated with poorer dietary habits, so including basic kitchen fixtures such as chopping boards, colanders and food prep knives, a microwave and generously sized refrigerators for storing food can all help make small, incremental improvements to occupant diets (see WELL Nutrition).
Food display strategies in healthy buildings
In addition, in the case that food or drink is provided by a workplace or school cafeteria, for example, the display of this food can impact consumption habits.
In the context of a healthy building plan, an increase in the visibility of healthy food options makes such options convenient and top-of-mind. This can be done through strategies such as providing easily reachable fruits and vegetables in the line of site for each diner, by placing clearly visible drinking water access points, or even through a “healthy convenience” rapid checkout line. All of this helps reduce tendencies for sugary drinks, junk food options and sweet snacks.
Finally, the ambiance of the healthy interior space itself can impact how people interact with their food. For example, glaring lights and loud noises can cause frustration or low level anxiety, leading to reduced eating times, and overeating as a result (by not allowing the body time to recognize it has reached a point of satiety), both detrimental to nutrition, digestion and weight management (Anthes).
Nutrition – promoting dining strategies for healthy interiors:
Designated eating spaces
Adequate food preparation and storage areas
Priority given to healthy food in terms of visibility and convenience
A comfortable, stress-free ambiance to encourage slow, mindful eating
Use of Signage Prompts and Labeling in healthy design interiors
The use of food-related signage and promotional messaging has been shown to impact our nutritional choices. Strategies such as including nutritional information, deliberately promoting healthy products, or using signage to guide consumers towards healthy products are all useful interventions that leverage environmental psychology principles.
Including nutritional information and health warnings on food can increase a healthy building occupant’s chances of making an informed food consumption decision. Whether that be allergy related, vitamin content, or calorie-based, the information can be subtly communicated without being overpowering or didactic.
In addition, food advertising has been shown to have direct and indirect impacts on consumers and nutrition. Children are especially susceptible to advertising, which may suggest that in places such as schools, promoting and marketing healthy options may have a positive impact over say, the extreme alternative of selling out to big brands pushing their sweetened products to children for example.
Healthy food advertising has been proven to increase the selection of healthy food choices. Although this concept is often applied to places like grocery stores, it can be used in cafeterias and workplace eating rooms to encourage healthy habits as well.
Along the vein of advertising, smart signage and visual guides can help nudge more nutritious food and drink choices. Visual aids can be used in and around eating areas to encourage the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and healthier drinking sources such as water.
Something as simple as an arrow guiding consumers towards healthier options can influence decisions. Educational signage can also be placed in locations outside of the eating areas—for example, colorful signs denoting the benefits of water consumption and healthy meals.
Nutrition-promoting visuals and signage in healthy interiors:
Include nutritional information on and near food
Advertise healthy options (rather than processed food products)
Use signage and visual guides to promote nutrition
Local Sourcing of Food for healthy building occupants
Locally grown food not only increases access to healthy nutrition options for a healthy building occupant, it also provides social and environmental benefits. When possible, community or educational gardens should be integrated into wellness real estate projects, be they residential, workplace or learning environments.
It has been shown that people who are engaged in gardening have higher levels of fruit and vegetable consumption, as well as improving other aspects of life—such as community connectivity, educational opportunities, and anxiety reduction (WELL). So a communal rooftop garden, no matter how small, can be a modest investment with tangible impacts for the overall healthy building strategy.
Gardens on a project site can provide opportunities for building occupants to connect with the land and the food they eat through learning, as well as acting as a local source of produce for cafeterias, if delivered at scale.
In the case of children, gardening can increase food knowledge and increase their willingness to try more vegetables, breaking down the barrier between the food on their plate and the natural cycle of growing / harvesting (Anthes). Eating habits are learned through our environmental cues—making gardening a very powerful tool to increase our knowledge and connection to nutrition, especially in students and children.
Depending on density constraints, the inclusion of rooftop gardens is becoming more popular in healthy buildings as they can be used even in high-density urban locations, while also providing a wealth of environmental benefits such as cooling / reducing the urban heat island effect, increased biodiversity and direct access to the calming, restorative benefits of nature for the building occupants.
Local Food Sourcing Strategies for Healthy Buildings:
Source food locally and provide healthy produce to cafeterias and building occupants
Include gardening to connect occupants to food
Use gardens as an educational and community fostering opportunity
Healthy Building Certification Systems on design for Nutrition and Hydration
Various healthy building certification systems provide a guide to nutrition-based health and design strategies. Most notably, WELL, Fitwel, and the Living Building Challenge offer insight and place varying levels of importance on nutrition and hydration.
The WELL Building Standard contains an entire concept, ‘Nourishment’ that discusses the importance of healthy diets and how our environments can promote this goal.
This standard focuses on factors such as increasing access to fruits and vegetables, nutritional transparency, food advertising, production, and preparation, as well as the concept of mindful eating (WELL). More information on the nourishment concept within the WELL healthy building standard can be found here.
Fitwel contains a ‘Food and Beverage’ Standard and a ‘Health Programming’ section that mention strategies to promote healthy eating.
This standard recommends certain types of on-site dining services and what food should be available, as well as implementing policies such as nutrition programs, healthy cooking classes or gardening workshops. More information on the Fitwel healthy building standard can be found here.
Although the Living Building Challenge green building standard doesn’t have a section specifically focused on nutrition, it has an imperative that focuses on urban agriculture.
This section mentions the importance of dedicating a space for growing food on site, connecting people to locally grown healthy nourishment options. More about the Place Petal and urban agriculture imperative can be found here.
Sources:
WELL v2 Wellness Real Esatte Standard
Fitwel healthy building standard
Living Building Challenge green building standard
Anthes, Emily. “3. STAIR MASTERS.” The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness, Scientific American/Picador, New York, 2021.