figshare
Browse

A Scoping Review of Food Literacy Interventions

Download (14.89 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2025-05-09, 04:31 authored by Keely O'BrienKeely O'Brien, Lesley MacDonald-WicksLesley MacDonald-Wicks, Susan HeaneySusan Heaney
Introduction: Food literacy (FL) is a rapidly emerging area of research that provides a framework to explain the interplay of food-related skills, beliefs, knowledge and practises that contribute to nutritional health and wellbeing. This review is the first to scope the current literature for FL interventions, assess their characteristics against the components provided in the most widely cited definition of FL. and describe their characteristics to identify gaps in the literature. Methods: This review scopes original articles describing FL interventions in the Medline, CINAHL, ProQuest Education, Web of Science and AMED databases up to August 2023. Results: Despite the heterogeneity between all seven included studies, they all demonstrated some improvements in their FL outcome measures alongside dietary intake (DI), with the greatest improvements seen in studies that employed a FL theoretical framework in intervention design. Populations at high risk of food insecurity, such as university students and people living in disadvantaged areas, were the main targets of FL interventions. Conclusion: The minimal inclusion of FL theory amongst interventions led to an overall poor coverage of essential FL components, indicating researchers should aim to design future FL interventions with a FL theoretical framework.

History

Journal title

Nutrients

Volume

16

Issue

18

Article number

3171

Publisher

MDPI AG

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing

School

Department of Rural Health

Rights statement

© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Usage metrics

    Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC