Promoting healthy eating through Instagram: The experience of the Teen Food page

Instagram, a social network for the creation and sharing of visual content, represents an integral part of the lives of young people. This quasi-experimental study aimed to explore its potential in promoting healthy eating. Bad eating habits, which are continually increasing among teenagers, require the implementation of effective, innovative intervention models that are attentive to the needs and interests of the target audience. The peculiar characteristics of Instagram - immediacy, usability, focus on visual contents - make it an intervention tool particularly suitable for achieving this purpose. In the present study, 60 high school students were exposed every day, for a month, to the Instagram Teen Food page, whose contents were focused on the healthy eating theme and the psychological variables associated with it. Specifically, the Theory of Planned Behavior represented the theoretical framework of the intervention. A control group of 48 students was compared to the group that received the intervention. The results of Student's t-test for dependent samples showed, in the experimental group, an increase in the intention to avoid the consumption of junk food and a reduction in the consumption of unhealthy snacks. These results encourage the development of future intervention strategies that envisage the use of Instagram as a tool for promoting health in the younger generations.