JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Obesity is a major risk factor of many chronic diseases. However, current obesity control policies and actions are not sufficient to halt the pandemic. It has been documented that more than half of adults are not able to interpret their own weight status, not to mention to practice healthy lifestyles. Social media and interactive websites can reach people interactively and in a long-term basis, which may be used as intervention vehicles to build up cognition for weight control and to promote healthy behavior practices.

Objective:

WAKE.TAIWAN is an ongoing online multi-facet healthy lifestyles promotion program with social media and interactive websites as the intervention vehicle. This study aimed to examine whether adults been reached by our program would increase awareness to their own anthropometric measures, correctly judge their body weight status, and practice healthy behaviors over time.

Methods:

This study adopted a quasi-experimental design with on-line questionnaire surveys. The experimental group consisted of the WAKE.TAIWAN Facebook group members aged 20-65 years, who have used the interactive website health education resources (N=177). The group was further stratified into two subgroups based on their duration of participation (E1 group: duration <1 year; E2 group: duration ≥ 1 year). The control group consisted of other Facebook users (N=545) at the same age range, who had not been exposed to the health education materials of this project. A total of 722 men (N=267) and women (N=455) participated in our survey conducted in year 2019. Data was analyzed for evaluating the program effectiveness, by using generalized linear model.

Results:

The proportion of people correctly interpreting their own weight status in the experimental group was greater than that of the control group (control group: 58.7%, E1: 60.2%, E2: 71.9%). The E2 experimental group was significantly better than the control group in paying attention to weight-related measures and in correctly interpreting their own weight status (OR=1.73, 95% CI 1.04-2.89, P=0.036). With respect to the behavioral stages of practicing healthy eating (P<.05) and active living (P<.05), both experimental groups, E1 & E2, performed significantly better than the control group.

Conclusions:

This study demonstrates that the longer the participants were exposed to our social media-based online programs, the higher the proportion of them would have the correct judgement on their weight status and fall in the higher stages of healthy lifestyle behaviors. Longitudinal follow-up survey is in place to verify these findings. Clinical Trial: IRB-EC1070802_E