Raber Margaret, Allen Haley, Huang Sophia, Vazquez Maria, Warner Echo, Thompson Debbe
Department of Health Disparities Research, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States.
Department of Kinesiology, Rice University, Houston, TX, United States.
JMIR Form Res. 2024 Jun 19;8:e51094. doi: 10.2196/51094.
The Mediterranean diet has been linked to reduced risk for several cardiometabolic diseases. The lack of a clear definition of the Mediterranean diet in the scientific literature and the documented proliferation of nutrition misinformation on the internet suggest the potential for confusion among consumers seeking web-based Mediterranean diet information.
We conducted a social media content analysis of information about the Mediterranean diet on the influential social media platform, TikTok, to examine public discourse about the diet and identify potential areas of misinformation. We then analyzed these findings in the context of health promotion to identify potential challenges and opportunities for the use of TikTok in promoting the Mediterranean diet for healthy living.
The first-appearing 202 TikTok posts that resulted from a search of the hashtag #mediterraneandiet were downloaded and qualitatively examined. Post features and characteristics, poster information, and engagement metrics were extracted and synthesized across posts. Posts were categorized as those created by health professionals and those created by nonhealth professionals based on poster-reported credentials. In addition to descriptive statistics of the entire sample, we compared posts created by professionals and nonprofessionals for content using chi-square tests.
TikTok posts varied in content, but posts that were developed by health professionals versus nonprofessionals were more likely to offer a definition of the Mediterranean diet (16/106, 15.1% vs 2/96, 2.1%; P=.001), use scientific citations to support claims (26/106, 24.5% vs 0/96, 0%; P<.001), and discuss specific nutrients (33/106, 31.1% vs 6/96, 6.3%; P<.001) and diseases related to the diet (27/106, 25.5% vs 5/96, 5.2%; P<.001) compared to posts created by nonhealth professionals.
Social media holds promise as a venue to promote the Mediterranean diet, but the variability in information found in this study highlights the need to create clear definitions about the diet and its components when developing Mediterranean diet interventions that use new media structures.
地中海饮食已被证明与降低多种心血管代谢疾病的风险有关。科学文献中对地中海饮食缺乏明确的定义，且互联网上营养错误信息大量传播，这表明在寻求基于网络的地中海饮食信息的消费者中可能存在困惑。
我们对有影响力的社交媒体平台TikTok上有关地中海饮食的信息进行了社交媒体内容分析，以研究关于该饮食的公众讨论，并识别潜在的错误信息领域。然后，我们在健康促进的背景下分析这些发现，以确定利用TikTok推广地中海饮食以促进健康生活的潜在挑战和机遇。
下载并定性检查了通过搜索标签#mediterraneandiet出现的前202条TikTok帖子。提取并综合了帖子的特征、发布者信息和参与度指标。根据发布者报告的资质，帖子被分为由健康专业人员创建的和由非健康专业人员创建的。除了对整个样本进行描述性统计外，我们还使用卡方检验比较了专业人员和非专业人员创建的帖子的内容。
TikTok帖子的内容各不相同，但与非健康专业人员创建的帖子相比，健康专业人员创建的帖子更有可能提供地中海饮食的定义（16/106，15.1%对2/96，2.1%；P = 0.001），使用科学引用来支持观点（26/106，24.5%对0/96，0%；P < 0.001），并讨论特定营养素（33/106，31.1%对6/96，6.3%；P < 0.001）以及与该饮食相关的疾病（27/106，25.5%对5/96，5.2%；P < 0.001）。
社交媒体有望成为推广地中海饮食的场所，但本研究中发现的信息差异凸显了在开发使用新媒体结构的地中海饮食干预措施时，需要对该饮食及其组成部分进行明确的定义。
