This is such a good idea, I’m wondering why it hasn’t been done before: using social media to increase fruit and vegetable intake in young people.
And it works – after just two weeks of following healthy eating social media accounts, people were persuaded to eat more sensibly and cut down on junk food and sugary drinks.
The work was led by Dr Lily Hawkins, with help from Dr Jason Thomas and Professor Claire Farrow of Aston University in Birmingham.
They recruited 52 volunteers, all social media users, with a mean age of 22, and split them into two groups.
Volunteers in the first group followed healthy eating Instagram accounts for a fortnight.
Those in the second control group followed interior design accounts for the same time.
The volunteers recorded what they ate and drank throughout.
Participants following the healthy eating accounts ate an extra 1.4 portions of fruit and vegetables per day and 0.8 fewer energy dense items, such as high-calorie snacks and sugar-sweetened drinks, per day. This is a substantial improvement on past attempts to improve diets.
“Affiliation” seems to be a key component of the change in eating behaviour. Participants who felt “affiliated” with other Instagram users changed more.
Less than a third of Brits eat the recommended five-a-day, so it’s vital to identify new ways to encourage higher consumption. For instance, using posters in staff canteens encouraging vegetable consumption have been shown to work.
Social media is so prevalent now that the researchers believe it could be an ideal way to spread positive social acceptance of high fruit and vegetable consumption, particularly among younger people.
Dr Thomas has high hopes.
He said: “This is only a pilot intervention study at the moment, but it’s quite an exciting suite of findings, as it suggests that even some minor tweaks to our social media accounts might lead to substantial improvements in diet, at zero cost!
“Our future work will examine whether such interventions actually do change perceptions of what others are consuming, and also, whether these interventions produce effects that are sustained over time.”
Dr Hawkins, who is now at the University of Exeter, said: “Our previous research has demonstrated that social norms on social media may nudge food consumption, but this pilot demonstrates that this translates to the real world.
“Of course, we would like to now understand whether this can be replicated in a larger, community sample.”
Best of luck.
It’s encouraging to see social media used as a real force for good.