Exercise and nutrition tracking service, MyFitnessPal, has partnered with the Bay Area’s second largest employer, the University of California, San Francisco, for a healthy lifestyle program (called Smart Choice Smart U), aimed at positively influencing the lifestyle choices of its more than 25,000 employees, visitors, and patients.
As part of the partnership MyFitnessPal said it will be adding “much” of the food served on UCSF Medical Center’s various campuses to its database of more than two million food items to make it easier for program participants to track their food choices.
“We’re adding approximately 200 food items from the UCSF Smart Choice outlets to the MyFitnessPal database to start,” said Al Lee, co-founder of MyFitnessPal. “Diners will also be able to take advantage of MyFitnessPal’s barcode scanner on over 85 per cent of Smart Choice items sold.”
As well as food monitoring, UCSF is also encouraging staff and visitors to track their activity by using the Fitbit health tracking device. Data from Fitbit can be synced with MyFitnessPal after the latter launched a private API in October — selecting Fitbit as one of a few selected companies in the partnership. Other MyFitnessPal API partners are BodyMedia, runtastic and Endomondo.
According to MyFitnessPal, its health tracking service now has more than 30 million users. The company said it hopes to “offer up more corporate wellness partnerships to the MyFitnessPal community in the future”.