Communication on healthy diet and weight loss in food blogs and other social media

Peer-reviewed | Manuscript received: March 16, 2015 | Revision accepted: January 19, 2016

A systematic review

Introduction

The internet is an integral part of today's media landscape. While in 2000 28.6% of the German population from the age of 14 years used the internet occasionally, by the end of 2014 their percentage had risen to 79.1% [1]. This also increased the use of social media1 (• Overview 1).

Among 14- to 29-year-old internet users, almost everybody (90%) has an account in one or more social networks [2]. Facebook alone is used in Germany by 19 million people every day. Thus, Facebook reaches more people than the three largest daily newspapers in Germany taken together [3]. The production of content and interaction, based on a self-organized, non-hierarchical operation is typical of social media [4]. Accordingly, for Nutrition and Health Science the way people communicate regarding nutrition is changing.

Summary

This systematic review examines communication on nutrition in social media. The aim of the study was to identify essential communicated contents and communication structures. Nine databases were used and eleven studies were found to be relevant. For this publication two issues were selected: Communication on “healthy diet” was characterized mainly by rigid dietary requirements and their strict implementation, whereas the social networks on “overweight and losing weight” were especially characterized by social support. The identified communication structures included democratization of nutritional knowledge and thus a strong influence on the expert-layman-relationship. Organizations and experts are called upon to become more involved and should play more of a supporting role. For this, social-media-trainings for experts and more research is needed.

Keywords: social media, nutrition, food blogs, healthy diet, overweight, weight loss, communication 

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