No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global public health emergency, increasing the prevalence of emotional distress, and potentially leading to altered diet behavior. Self-efficacy measures various aspects of perceiving and understanding emotions. The present study was carried out with the objective of understanding the effect of emotional self-efficacy on dietary behavior and quality. It also shed light on which elements contributed to the link between food-related behavior and perceived dietary quality during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the factor analysis of nineteen food groups, choices, consumption, and socioeconomic status were examined in a sample of 441 Chinese participants. Multiple linear regression examined the association between food consumption, dietary quality, and self-efficacy. Contrary to prior research, the intake of salty snacks and alcoholic beverages dropped by 3.3% and 2.8%, respectively, during the first lockdown. Emotional self-efficacy negatively mediated the relationship between socioeconomic status and dietary quality. In conclusion, emotional self-efficacy is a well-established tool for evaluating how Chinese people cope with negative emotions. As an individual’s dietary quality was affected during the imposed lockdown, the present study offers valuable insight into psychosocial factors that may contribute to health disparities by advocating for organized nutritional support in future epidemic-related quarantines.

Objectives Advertising messages can affect the public as a risk or protective factor for socially disadvantaged groups, and they may reflect how characters reflect perceptions are perceived in a society. This study aimed to investigate how older people are portrayed in televised food commercials from the approach of a healthy aging perspective in contemporary Chinese society. Methods All televised advertising in the Ad Topic archive were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, and a total of 164 commercials from the years of 2016–2019 that portrayed Chinese older people were sampled. The association between the main older characters with the product categories, healthy vs. unhealthy foods, use of health claims, sex, type of spokesperson, companions, and tones and manners were included in the analysis. Results Older people more frequently appeared in unhealthy food products than in healthy food products. Health claims involving older adults were portrayed adequately, whereas nursing professions as companions of older adults were overlooked. Positive advertising that delivered happy, caring, or warm tones was overwhelmingly represented. Thus, the advertising messages circulated in China represent a binary stereotype model of images of older adults’ characteristics that reflect ageist and the so-called agelessism, referring to the new application of the look from the approach of social psychology and marketing field. Conclusions This study examined aging discrimination reflected in advertisements. Studies exploring the impact of a crisis remain limited. Research is needed to improve the accuracy of advertised healthy older adults and normal aging.

Background Ongoing rumors and fake news regarding food fraud, adulteration, and contamination are highly visible. Health risk information circulating through media and interpersonal communication channels has made health crisis an important research agenda. Objective This study explored the issue of food fraud and the effect of misinformation. Further, it assessed whether and how these issues have provided evidence-based interventions for food handlers and regulators to mitigate fraud misinformation. Methods The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) was adopted for a collaborative study in China, after which a cross-sectional survey with door-to-door interviews was performed. Participants from Beijing and Hefei were selected using multistage sampling of adults in May 2017. Based on 4 government surveillance reports on food rumors and safety incidents, a descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and analysis of variance were performed on the data. Results A total of 3090 results were gathered and analyzed. Among the respondents, 83.6% (2584/3090) heard at least one food rumor. Learning about food fraud was correlated with interpersonal connections (eg, doctors or health specialists) for accessing food health information. Overall, Chinese citizens with a higher level of interpersonal connection were more likely to be concerned about food incidents with a statistical difference (P<.001). Interpersonal connection was the most frequent communication source (698/1253, 55.7%), followed by traditional media (325/1253, 25.9%) and internet portals (144/1253, 11.5%). There was a significant relationship between media use and media category in Beijing (P<.001) and Hefei (P<.001). Overall, responses to food fraud and incident risks were lower in Beijing than in Hefei (P=.006). The respondents in Beijing were confronted more frequently by food rumors (range 346-1253) than those in Hefei (range 155-946). The urban dwellers in Beijing and their rural counterparts in Hefei also differed in terms of perceiving different levels of food risks from different media sources. The food rumor narratives that examined the conspiracy belief showed that social media played more important roles in influencing attitudes against misinformation for users in Hefei than in Beijing. Conclusions This study shows that consumers have to be on guard against not only fake food, but also spreading fake information and rumors, as well as conspiracy beliefs involving fake food. This study focused on characterizing media sources, types of food fraud misinformation, and risk perceptions of food safety, which mix urgency and suspicion, and attempted to provide evidence-based interventions for risk management guidance, with the hypothesis of significant correlations between media types and sources, and consumer exposure and perception levels of food rumors and risks.

Background The fact that the number of individuals with obesity has increased worldwide calls into question media efforts for informing the public. This study attempts to determine the ways in which the mainstream digital news covers the etiology of obesity and diseases associated with the burden of obesity. Objective The dual objectives of this study are to obtain an understanding of what the news reports on obesity and to explore meaning in data by extending the preconceived grounded theory. Methods The 10 years of news text from 2010 to 2019 compared the development of obesity-related coverage and its potential impact on its perception in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Digital news stories on obesity along with affliction and inferences in 9 Chinese mainstream newspapers were sampled. An automatic content analysis tool, DiVoMiner was proposed. This computer-aided platform is designed to organize and filter large sets of data on the basis of the patterns of word occurrence and term discovery. Another programming language, Python 3, was used to explore connections and patterns created by the aggregated interactions. Results A total of 30,968 news stories were identified with increasing attention since 2016. The highest intensity of newspaper coverage of obesity communication was observed in Taiwan. Overall, a stronger focus on 2 shared causative attributes of obesity is on stress (n=4483, 33.0%) and tobacco use (n=3148, 23.2%). The burdens of obesity and cardiovascular diseases are implied to be the most, despite the aggregated interaction of edge centrality showing the highest link between the “cancer” and obesity. This study goes beyond traditional journalism studies by extending the framework of computational and customizable web-based text analysis. This could set a norm for researchers and practitioners who work on data projects largely for an innovative attempt. Conclusions Similar to previous studies, the discourse between the obesity epidemic and personal afflictions is the most emphasized approach. Our study also indicates that the inclination of blaming personal attributes for health afflictions potentially limits social and governmental responsibility for addressing this issue.