Eating behaviors and healthy food choices are associated with food literacy, and they have a huge impact on one's health status. For that reason, to increase food literacy is a way to effectively help individuals make appropriate choices that help maintain health and diminish the incidence of non-communicable diseases. The objective of this work was to test and validate a scale to assess food literacy. The validation was conducted on a sample of 924 Portuguese university students. The scale was composed of 50 items, which were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factors analysis. The final validated scale corresponded to a second-order model with a global factor called "Food literacy", which retained 26 items distributed by three factors: F1-literacy about the nutritional composition of foods (10 items), F2-literacy about labelling and food choices (7 items), and F3-literacy about healthy eating practices (9 items). The internal consistency of the scale is very high, with an alpha higher than 0.9, and the Pierson correlations between the three factors and the global are also higher than 0.9. In conclusion, the present scale has been validated and can therefore be utilized to measure food literacy.
Keywords: food consumption; food knowledge; food literacy; healthy eating; nutrition knowledge; questionnaire survey; structural equation model; university students.