In Sickness and in Health

It is commonplace to hear or read about connections between food and health in different kinds of media today. One day one hears that one thing is good to eat and the next that something else is dangerous and so on. The amount of health information is growing, and so is the amount of confusing health-related information. How do people interact with all this? The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between the existing level of knowledge in health matters, health behaviour and the preference for health information sources related to nutrition. Fifty Finnish people were involved in this research.
Three groups of people are studied: diabetics, pregnant women, and a control group. These people are found to differ in their preference for health information sources. The respondents are divided into three clusters according to source preference: ‘the professionals’ cluster’, preferring information from health professionals; ‘the popularized science cluster’, mainly using information from sources including popularized science; and ‘the everyday information cluster’, using the daily news media.
The thesis shows that information source use and information behaviour are related to level of knowledge and, to some extent, also to the health and eating behaviours of the respondents.

Keywords: health, pregnancy