A study found that users who follow accounts related to healthy eating on social media can make positive changes in their eating habits, such as increasing their intake of fruits and vegetables and reducing their consumption of junk food.
This is the result of a two-week experiment conducted by researchers at Aston University in the UK, recruiting 52 social media users with an average age of 22. The researchers divided the participants into two groups, with one group following Instagram accounts related to healthy eating and the control group following interior design accounts. For the next two weeks, participants recorded what they ate and drank.
As a result, overall, participants who followed healthy eating accounts consumed 1.37 more servings of fruits and vegetables per day and consumed 0.81 fewer servings of high-calorie foods such as high-calorie snacks or sugar-sweetened beverages compared to participants in the control group.
The researchers speculated that affinity may be a key factor that led to changes in eating habits. For example, this effect was more pronounced among participants who felt related to other Instagram users. Agreeableness refers to the desire, motivation, or behavior to establish and maintain positive emotional relationships with other people. It is a concept that includes a common motivation or action based on having fun together and working together to achieve something.
“Although this is only a preliminary study at the moment, these results are very interesting as they suggest that making small changes to your social media accounts can help you improve your diet at no cost,” the researchers said. “Future studies will look to do the same in larger, more diverse samples.” “We will aim to see if we get results,” he said.
The results of this study were published in the journal Digital Health, titled ‘Can social media be used to increase fruit and vegetable consumption? It was published under the title ‘A pilot intervention study’.
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