Communicating Health to Young Adults Using Social Media: How, Where, and When?

Communication with young adults about healthy lifestyle behaviours needs to result in improvements in dietary choices to impact the prevalence of diet-related diseases. This paper presents the health beliefs, behaviours, and communication practices in young Australian adults (n = 2019) by their pre-defined psycho-behavioural characteristics: Lifestyle Mavens, Health-Conscious, Aspirational Healthy Eaters, Balanced-All Rounders, Contemplating Another Day, or Blissfully Unconcerned. The Lifestyle Mavens and Health-Conscious groups were more likely to actively seek out health information on social media (p < 0.

Nutrition Meets Social Marketing: Targeting Health Promotion Campaigns to Young Adults Using the Living and Eating for Health Segments.

Young adults are a key target age group for lifestyle behaviour change as adoption of healthier behaviours has the potential to impact long term health. This paper arises from a multi-disciplinary research project, Communicating Health, which aims to bridge the gap between nutritionists, media, and social marketing professionals to produce the tools that may be used to improve engagement with young adults and reduce the prevalence of obesity. The aim of this paper is to provide nuanced details of the psycho-behavioral characteristics of each of these Living and Eating for Health Segments (LEHS).

Beyond Body Weight: Design and Validation of Psycho-Behavioural Living and Eating for Health Segments (LEHS) Profiles for Social Marketing.

Obesity, sedentary behaviour, and poor dietary habits amongst young adults are growing concerns, with this age group being in a worse state of health and nutrition than adolescents and adults. This paper presents the procedures for establishing a new instrument for defining behaviours in relation to healthy lifestyle and food choices amongst young adults (Living and Eating for Health Segments: LEHS). The aim of this paper is to outline the instrument design protocol for external validation and to permit replication in other studies.

Strategies to Improve Health Communication: Can Health Professionals be Heroes?

Communicating evidence-based nutrition messages to the public is challenging and is often in conflict with popular opinions, particularly from social media influencers (SMIs). In order to increase engagement with nutrition professionals (NPs) on social media, we aimed to explore young adults' perceptions of the authenticity and trustworthiness of SMIs and NPs Instagram posts. A cross-sectional questionnaire was administered to students ( = 149) from an Australian University.

A social marketing perspective of young adults' concepts of eating for health: is it a question of morality?

Background: Poor dietary choices are a risk factor for non-communicable diseases. Young adults have low levels of engagement towards their health and may not see the importance in the adoption of healthy eating behaviours at this stage in their lives. Here we utilise social marketing principles, digital ethnography and online conversations to gain insights into young adults' attitudes and sentiments towards healthy eating.