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

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.