Journal of Health Literacy

Journal of Health Literacy

Nutrition Literacy And Its Predictors In Overweight/Obese And Non-Overweight/Obese Adult Turkish Women

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Ezgi Hasret Kozan Cikirikci 1, 2
Melek Nihal Esin 1
1 Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Department of Public Health Nursing, Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa, Istanbul, Türkiye.
2 Department of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, Halic University, Istanbul, Türkiye.
10.22038/jhl.2024.80045.1578
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Nutrition literacy has an important role in gaining healthy eating habits and preventing chronic diseases related to nutrition such as obesity. This study aims to determine the level of nutrition literacy of adult Turkish women and its predictors. 

Materials and Methods: In this comparative descriptive research, 239 women were selected into 2 groups by their BMI, from Public Education Centers in Istanbul, Turkey, by using simple random sampling method. Data were collected using the Introductory Characteristics Form and Adult Nutrition Literacy Assessment Tool. 

Results: Among the participants, 18.8% of women had inadequate, 20.5% had borderline and 60.7% had adequate nutrition literacy. Nutrition literacy scores varied between groups, with 37.3% of overweight/obese women showing inadequate nutrition literacy, while 91.7% of non-overweight/obese women demonstrated adequate literacy. In the study, adequate numerical literacy and food label reading rate of women with overweight/obese was found lower than women without overweight/obese. It was also found that the number of main meals increases the nutritional literacy level in women with overweight/obese. In the overweight/obese group, it was found that nutritional literacy increases 0.333 times by the number of children, 0.369 times by the waist circumference, 0.626 times by the snack amount and 91.166 times by Youtube usage. 

Conclusion: The nutrition literacy of both groups was found to be high. This study revealed that number of daily meals and snacks, children, waist circumferences, media usage, and gender roles are preditors of nutrition literacy in Turkish adult women. An important finding of this study is that nutrition literacy is highly affected by YouTube usage which provides a new perspective in terms of public health practices and policies. It is recommended for public health nurses to use this influence of social media when planning health promoting interventions.
Keywords
Diet
Health Literacy
Nutrition Literacy
Obesity
Overweight
Women

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the Kadikoy Rasimpasa and Moda Gonulluevi for their collaboration and the participants for giving their valuable time.


Availability of data and materials: The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.


Conflict of interest: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.


Consent for publication: The authors hereby give consent for publication of the manuscript.


Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethics Committee Approval was obtained from Uskudar University (Approval Number: B.08.6.YOK.2.US.0.05.0.06/2018/748), and permission to collect data from Public Education Centers was granted. An Informed Voluntary Consent Form was provided to each participant, detailing the study’s purpose, use of personal data, and contact information for the researcher. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants before data collection.


Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.


Authors' Contributions: EHKC contributed to the study design, data collection, data analysis and manuscript writing. MNE contributed to data analysis, interpretation and critical revision of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

 

Open Access Policy: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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