Aims: To investigate whether members of the public read blogs for the purpose of accessing healthy eating information; examine demographic predictors of healthy eating blog readership, specifically education, gender, age, body mass index, and residential location; and explore the reasons for reading, and not reading, healthy eating blogs.
Methods: This study used a cross-sectional online self-reported survey design collected over three time points (round 1: December 2017-March 2018, round 2: August 2018-December 2018, round 3: December 2021-March 2022). The total sample of participants comprised of 238 respondents with a mean age of 46 years old, who mostly reported gender as female (82%), being educated with a university degree (69%), and predominantly resided in urban and city areas (84%).
Results: Fifty-one percent of respondents reported reading healthy eating blogs, suggesting that consumers were proactively seeking healthy eating information through this avenue. Participants who identified as female were 3.2 times more likely to read healthy eating blogs. Commonly, healthy eating blogs were read to receive practical information that aligned with current food choices. The main reason participants reported not reading healthy eating blogs was not thinking about using them (29%).
Conclusions: Understanding who is seeking healthy eating information through blogs, and their reasons doing so, is important to continue research into the potential effectiveness of blogs as a platform to communicate healthy eating and nutrition messages. This study provides direction for further investigation into how dietetics professionals could effectively use blogs to disseminate healthy eating information and positively influence consumer food choices and dietary intake.
Keywords: blogs; health communication; healthy eating; nutrition information; online social networking.
© 2023 The Authors. Nutrition & Dietetics published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Dietitians Australia.