Grammatical style of nutrition education messages

Nutrition education messages were written about eight different foods or food products in eight different styles. Styles were suggestions, instructions using 'should', rhetorical questions using 'how about' or 'why not', statements of fact, positive commands, positive commands followed by negative commands or vice versa. Subjects (n 160) rated messages for persuasiveness and also stated how often they already complied with each message. Scores were adjusted to remove the contributions related to sex, age group, social class, reported compliance and food about which the message had been written. The main factor influencing score for persuasiveness was the extent to which subjects claimed to be already complying with the messages. There were no significant effects of the method of construction of messages on score using one-way analysis of variance.     

The structure and content of nutrition education messages

The study was designed to investigate the response of people to nutritional messages written in different ways. For Experiment 1, positive and negative statements were constructed in which people were encouraged to «eat>> or «avoid>>, with implicit or unstated alternative, or to «eat and avoid>> or «avoid and eat>>. In total there were 64 statements; each was followed by a brief reason for the action and this was constant for each food. To avoid bias and ensure that the eight foods appeared on each questionnaire in a different order every time, the messages were set out in a Graeco-Latin square. Subjects were asked to rate the messages on a scale (1–7) for whether they were «reasonable>>, «practical>> and «compelling>>. Additionally, for each message subjects were asked whether they already perform what is described in the message. The type of message construction appeared to be most important for the word «compelling>>. It appeared that messages with a single element (whether positive or negative) were less «compelling>> than those with two elements (positive and negative). For Experiment 2, 64 messages were written in which the first part was written as a command with a negative aspect followed by a positive one («avoid and eat>>). The reason given in support was classified in four ways and written in lay terms or using more technical words. It was concluded that messages including medical terms were most «compelling>> and that all messages were reduced in score when incorporating «technical>> terms.     

How university students evaluate the grammatical style of nutrition messages?

Summary  This study was designed to investigate the response of university students to eight different types of nutritional messages, which encouraged consuming the recommended daily servings of fruit and vegetables to help reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer and obesity. The formats used included offers, obligations, rhetorical questions using 'how about' or 'why not', a suggestive statement, a positive command and a positive command followed by a negative command and vice versa. The aim of the study was to determine if various grammatical styles of the same message could affect respondents' views of their persuasiveness. A total of 1319 university students rated each message for persuasiveness. Positive commands using 'could', instructions which incorporated 'should' and rhetorical question using 'how about' were considered to be more persuasive than the other styles of nutrition messages ( P  < 0.01).     

The (ir)relevance of framing nutrition education messages

Persuasive health education messages can either stress the positive consequences of performing a healthy behaviour (gain-frame) or the negative consequences of not performing a healthy behaviour (loss-frame). Based on studies on topics such as sun protection and breast self-examination there is evidence that messages in different action frames may differ in persuasive effects. Three randomised controlled trials were conducted to test framing effects in nutrition education on specific nutrition-related attitudes and intentions. In study 1, effects of gain-framed and loss-framed messages were studied among 152 adult education students on attitudes and intentions related to fat, fruit and vegetable consumption. In study 2 we confronted 149 regular students with differently framed messages related to a (more or less fictive) preventive dietary behaviour that was expected to be unknown to the study population, intake of flavonoids and risk for chronic disease. The impact on attitudes and intentions to use flavonoid-enriched spreads was studied. In study 3 we studied the effects of differently framed messages on attitudes and intentions related to more immediate and more personally relevant diet nutrition behaviour: folic acid supplement use before and during pregnancy among 100 female students. No significant differences in attitudes or intentions to perform the preventive nutrition behaviours were found between the gain-frame conditions and the loss-frame conditions in all three studies. The (lack of) effects were not moderated by factors such as perceived personal relevance, credibility or novelty of the information, or the perceived importance of the topic addressed. The results of the present studies suggest that action-frame choice has a very limited impact on the effectiveness of nutrition education in changing precautionary motivation.     

Communicating actionable nutrition messages: challenges and opportunities

As long as health communications have existed in the USA, Americans have faced the task of sorting the agenda of the source from the advice it provides. That task has become more complicated as advances in the science of nutrition and the technology used to present it have heightened the complexity of nutrition communications. Getting consumers to adopt a healthier diet has been a protracted undertaking with limited successes along the way. The obesity epidemic has added urgency to this discourse: not only do we need to eat better, but most of us also need to eat less. This paper reviews the dynamics that have made the communication of accurate and actionable health behaviour information an ongoing challenge, and outlines strategies for moving ahead. It considers the interplay of four sets of factors: the evolutionary nature of the science on which recommendations are based; the many sources of communication about that science; the agendas or motivations of each source; and finally the multifaceted nature of consumers, the recipients of these communications. Communication alone has not been, and will not be, sufficient for consumers to adopt the behavioural changes endorsed by experts. Broad environmental interventions coupled with individual skills development will need to be part of the process. Ultimately, it is the consumer who decides what is for dinner. Media literacy will play a critical role in building consumer efficacy in sorting fact from fiction in order to select food for a healthful diet.     

Parental messages and the nutrition awareness of preschool children

Questionnaires were developed to assess the early nutrition-related knowledge and attitudes of preschool children and the types of messages that their parents give to them about nutrition. Subjects were 104 children, aged 3½ to 3¾ years, and their mothers, enrolled in the longitudinal Western Massachusetts Growth Study. The children showed significant levels of nutrition knowledge in the areas of food groups, food transformations, food origins, and energy balance. They also demonstrated some ability to judge relative food values: more children selected foods of higher, rather than lower, nutrient density in a role-play situation, as being the foods which would help a doll “grow big and strong.” Parental messages about foods and nutrition, derived from open-ended questions asked of the mothers, were categorized into the following groups: passive and non-verbal, example, discouragement or encouragement, general nutrition, specific nutrition, physical, bribes and rewards, and authoritarian messages. The quantity and specificity of nutrition-related messages given by parents and about foods were significantly and positively correlated to the children's nutrition knowledge scores. This study documents a significant level of nutrition awareness among young children, and highlights the importance of early parent-child communication patterns in the development of this nutrition awareness.     

Comparison of the costs of compliance with nutrition education messages to improve the diets of Bangladeshi breastfeeding mothers and weaning-age children

Local market prices in rural Bangladesh were used to compute the costs of filling the nutrient gaps between actual intakes and safe nutrient requirements, and the costs of compliance with nutrition messages, for 78 lactating mothers and 61 weaning-age breastfed children. (The gap is the difference between the requirement and the amount of nutrient consumed.) To fill the mother's energy gap of approximately 1050 kcal (4393 kJ) would cost an additional 21% of the daily wage, or almost double the value of food she was presently eating. Given social reality, these costs would probably be much greater, as the mother would also need to increase the allocation of food to other household members. The weaning-age children's energy gap could theoretically be closed for less than one-third of the cost of improving the mothers' diets, or about 8% of the daily wage. The increase in food intake equivalent to 2% of the daily wage actually achieved through nutrition education resulted in a significant improvement in child weight gain, though not ideal. These findings suggest that, in the absence of programs which reduce economic barriers, it is economically feasible for families to close the nutrient gaps for weaning-age breastfed children in Bangladesh, but not for lactating women. Thus, education to improve women's diets should be incorporated into programs that make these improvements affordable, whereas education to improve weaning-age children's diets can be implemented with or without other program supports.     

Impact of nutrition messages on children's food choice: pilot study

This pilot study tested the influence of nutrition message framing on snack choice among kindergarteners. Three classrooms were randomly assigned to watch one of the following 60s videos: (a) a gain-framed nutrition message (i.e. the positive benefits of eating apples) (n=14); (b) a loss-framed message (i.e. the negative consequences of not eating apples) (n=18); or (c) a control scene (children playing a game) (n=18). Following this, the children were offered a choice between animal crackers and an apple for their snack. Among the children who saw one of the nutrition message videos, 56% chose apples rather than animal crackers; in the control condition only 33% chose apples. This difference was statistically significant (chi2=7.56, p<0.01). These results suggest that videos containing nutritional messages may have a positive influence on children's short-term food choices.