UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — To help Americans improve their diet, the 2020-25 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend using herbs and spices in cooking to help limit the amount of added sugars, saturated fats and sodium in food. Effectively educating people about dietary guidelines and associated recommendations, however, can be difficult.
In a new study, researchers in the Penn State Department of Nutritional Sciences and College of Medicine found video-based content is more effective than traditional paper handouts to educate individuals about ways to improve their diet. Their findings were published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
“Conversations with patients in a primary care setting naturally include ways to live a healthier lifestyle, such as exercising more and consuming a healthier diet, but those conversations often don’t include ways to start, which can feel overwhelming,” said Travis Masterson, assistant professor of nutritional sciences and senior author on the publication. “We developed materials to give patients a tangible starting point where they don’t necessarily have to talk about weight or their favorite fad diet. It’s basic principles of reducing salt, sugar and fat in your diet, which everyone can benefit from.”
Masterson worked with Penn State Extension in the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences to develop both video and print-based materials to educate patients on ways to incorporate herbs and spices in their diets more broadly. The researchers teamed up with Michael Flanagan, a family medicine physician, to reach patients at a Penn State Health office in State College.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, patients would typically sit in a waiting room after check-in until the provider was ready for them. Now, Penn State Health moves patients into an exam room quickly after check-in to avoid crowds in waiting rooms and reduce the risk of spreading respiratory illnesses. This shift provided downtime that the researchers said they could use to introduce educational materials.
The team developed five short videos, each explaining how different herbs and spices flavored dishes while reducing added sugars, sodium and saturated fat. Every video also featured a Penn State Extension educator, who was also a registered dietitian nutritionist, demonstrating simple cooking skills and food safety tips. The content from the videos was also used to develop three handouts.
One hundred and two patients were asked to scan a QR code that brought up either the videos or the handout materials. After viewing the materials, participants completed a post-intervention survey. All participants received the same survey questions regardless of their placement in the video or handout group.
The researchers found that, by most metrics, the videos more effectively delivered nutritional information than the handouts. Compared to the handout group, the video group participants reported significantly higher interest and confidence in using herbs and spices to increase healthy food consumption and decrease the amount of saturated fats, added sugars and salt.
While Masterson said this isn’t surprising given trends in how individuals consume media, it is helpful in guiding the development of future educational materials for use in similar settings.
However, the researchers did identify one challenge with video content in the study. Patients often did not have time to watch all five videos in their entirety, as the total runtime was almost 20 minutes.
Masterson is now working with Penn State Extension to develop shorter videos covering the same information to determine if the material can be conveyed adequately in less time. He and Flanagan are also looking to replicate this study with medical providers to see if the videos can shift the ways in which they relay nutrition information to patients.
Masterson and Flanagan said this project provided a great opportunity for translational research — taking the team’s scientific findings and applying them to a real-world medical clinic setting.
“We don’t often get to take a project to that next level of seeing how it impacts people’s everyday lives, but this project allowed us to take that next step and positively impact many people,” Masterson said.
Medical students Alison Johnston and Morgan Voulo were involved in every step of the project, from the recruiting of participants to ensuring they were going through all the correct protocols and analyzing the data that was collected.
This research was funded by the Huck Family Endowment for Nutrition Research in Family and Community Medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine.