What are effective communication strategies for disseminating evidence-based nutritional information?

Due to technological advancements, there is an enormous excess of nutritional information available at all times. Concurrently, the quality of this information is often low and conflicting information is omnipresent. This conflicting nutritional information can lead to confusion, distrust in experts, lower intentions to perform health behaviour and the use of heuristics that can lead to errors in decision making. There is therefore a clear need for reliable and unambiguous nutritional information in the current information landscape. The aim of this study is to investigate and develop effective communication strategies for disseminating scientifically based nutritional information. In order to achieve this, the following steps will be taken: 1) a qualitative study into the how and why of nutritional information seeking. In this way, insight can be gained into the motivators of nutritional information seeking and it can be investigated how people determine whether information is reliable and how uncertainties (e.g. due to contradictory or unreliable information) are dealt with during the search process. This first part will also provide an initial insight into the respondents' preferences concerning nutritional communication. 2) A large-scale survey to gain insight into the communication preferences of the general public. Vignettes in which type of endorser, type of medium and type of discourse are manipulated will be tested. The usability of a medium will also be measured by means of validated instruments. The representativeness of this sample allows for segmenting the general public so that future communication strategies can be tailored to these segments. 3) Psychophysiological experiments in which type of endorser, type of medium and type of discourse are manipulated, and subsequent physical tension, facial expressions and eye movements are measured. In this way it is possible to gauge how much physical tension a media message induces, whether this tension is positive or negative (facial expressions) and what causes this tension (eye tracking). 4) Development and evaluation of a prototype of an independent nutritional information platform.