Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 8, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 8, 2023 - Mar 22, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 15, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Online content on diet and nutrition written in Japanese: development of a systematic extraction strategy based on Google Trends and Google Search and descriptive analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
The increased availability of content of uncertain integrity through the internet is a major cause of concern. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive scrutiny of the fitness-for-purpose of online content on diet and nutrition.
Objective:
Objective:
The aim of this study was to describe diet- and nutrition-related online content written in Japanese, identified on the basis of a systematic extraction strategy using Google Trends and Google Search.
Methods:
Methods:
In this cross-sectional study, we first identified keywords relevant for extracting online content (e.g., blogs) on diet and nutrition written in Japanese using Google Trends. This process included identification of 638 seed terms, identification of about 1500 pairs of “top searches” and “search terms”, top 10% of which extracted to identify 160 relevant pairs of “top searches” and “search terms”, and identification of 107 “keywords for search”. We then extracted relevant online content using Google Search.
Results:
Results:
The content (n 1703) examined here was extracted following a search based on 107 keywords. The most common theme in the content was food and beverages (22.9%), followed by weight management (21.5%), health benefits (15.3%), and healthy eating (13.8%). The main disseminators were information technology companies and mass media (27.8%), followed by food manufacturers (14.5%), other (13.9%), and medical institutions (12.6%). Less than half of the content (46.4%) clearly indicated the involvement of either editors or writers. In contrast, more than half of the content were accompanied by one or more kinds of advertisement (57.7%). Further, the proportion of content with any kind of citation reference was 40%. The themes and disseminators of content were significantly associated with the involvement of editors or writers, accompaniment with advertisement, and citation of reference. In particular, content focusing on weight management was more likely to clearly indicate the involvement of editors or writers (57.9%) and to be accompanied by advertisement (74.6%), while they were less likely to have references cited (35.0%). Additionally, content from medical institutions was less likely to have citation references (29.0%).
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
This study raises concerns regarding the authorship, conflicts of interest (advertising), and scientific credibility of online diet- and nutrition-related information written in Japanese. For future work, it is necessary to determine the accuracy and quality of online content on as many themes as possible, and to examine whether the present findings are also relevant to diet- and nutrition-related content obtained via other major mass media and social media, as well as to content in other languages. Clinical Trial: not applicable
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Copyright
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