Healthy Eating in The Digital Era
Advancing Research with Middle-Class Focus Groups In Buenos Aires
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.48.105Keywords:
digital media, food, health, middle classAbstract
We analyze how a group of middle-class adults in the city of Buenos Aires, mostly women, use digital media in their food practices. Based on six focus groups we conducted in 2023 and 2024, we analyze what food content they pay attention to, how they give credibility to different sources and advisors and, more generally, what they consider positive and negative aspects of food and health content in the digital environment. We articulate the debates on the uses of digital media in food with sociological studies on interpersonal networks in health. This is a topic that has been less explored in the most recent studies that have focused on social ties and communities linked to health that are formed in the digital environment. The results show that digital platforms are useful tools for education and awareness of healthy eating, but that they also generate misinformation and amplify anxieties and food panics, which lead to “digital detoxification” strategies. We show the influence of digital social networks in the broader context of offline interpersonal networks in health and their contribution to critical content consumption.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Betina Freidin, Matías Salvador Ballesteros, Josefina Roques
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