Abstract

Introduction: In Spain, on 14 March 2020, a state of alarm is declared to face the health emergency situation caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus, limiting the freedom of movement of people. The Spanish population is confined.Objective: With this situation, “NUTRITIONAL HEALTH IS NOT CONFINED” arises a research project that seeks to promote nutritional education based on the pattern of the Mediterranean diet (MD) using new computer technologies. It is about providing the population with the information of general interest about the promotion of a healthy diet through social networks and analysing the impact of its dissemination, in the form of a longitudinal intervention study of the Spanish nutritional evolution during confinement, with a daily survey format, and it is intended to assess food consumption during the period of confinement. Materials and methods: In total, 936 participants were asked every day. Short publications were published every day based on the scientific evidence (FAO, WHO, AECOSAN) through social media such as Instagram, accompanied by a questionnaire of 11 questions (yes/no) where it was intended to assess the evolution of daily consumption.Results and Discussion: The diffusion through social media has allowed to have a greater reach of the population. We observed that mood throughout confinement generally improves. There are certain eating habits from the MD that are well established in the daily diet of our population, such as the consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, dairy products, and eggs. It seems that enjoying good health is a growing concern in pandemic situations, which is why inappropriate behaviours such as “snacking” between meals or the consumption of processed foods such as snacks, industrial pastries, soft drinks, and sweets are avoided, increasing the amount of healthy food such as meat and fish. This study opens up future avenues of research promoting MD and implements new cohort nutritional databases, especially about young adult people, who are adept at navigating digital spaces and therefore using social media.

Highlights

  • In Spain, on 14 March 2020, a state of alarm is declared to face the health emergency situation caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus, limiting the freedom of movement of people

  • Having reviewed and analysed the data obtained in Instagram, we consider these data to be of great use for future research related to the implementation of Mediterranean diet (MD), and to promote nutritional health through social media, applications, blogs, etc. [3, 22,23,24, 24]

  • The main objective of this study was to provide the population with the information of general interest on the promotion of healthy eating through social media and analyse the impact of its dissemination, in addition to assessing the consumption of food during the period of confinement

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Summary

Introduction

In Spain, on 14 March 2020, a state of alarm is declared to face the health emergency situation caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus, limiting the freedom of movement of people. The dissemination of content on social media presents a series of advantages with respect to the paper format, such as immediate communication and instantaneous assessment of the reactions of readers, and sharing knowledge of any field reaching more niches of population [2]. That is why this format is chosen with the aim of reaching as many people as possible without biases of age, profession, interest in a particular healthy life, or level of training or special knowledge, only the employment of the social network chosen for the dissemination of #nutritionalhealthisnotconfined [3]

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