Measuring Nutrition Literacy: Problems and Potential Solutions

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Carbone ET. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Health literacy is defined as the “degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” [1]. Health literacy skills encompass a wide range of components: reading and writing (print literacy), speaking and listening (oral/aural literacy), numeracy (use of numbers), and cultural and conceptual knowledge [2]. Health literacy is one of the most important crosscutting issues to affect health in the US [2]. Indeed, it is a stronger predictor of a person’s health than age, income, employment status, education level, and race [3]. Poor health literacy affects all levels of the health care experience. It impedes provider-patient communications, and affects the ability to access and navigate the health service system [2]. The readability of health information is also of concern. More than 90 million adults in the US have limited ability to use print materials to accomplish everyday tasks. Most adults read at an eighth-grade level and 20% read at or below a fifth-grade level [4,5], yet many health education materials are written at a ninth-grade level or above [6]. If this disparity is not addressed, providers will be unable to respond adequately to growing global health concerns such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer [7].