Nutripedia: The fight against the fake news in nutrition during pregnancy and early life

Abstract

(1) Background. Early nutrition and lifestyle before and during pregnancy, breastfeeding, infancy, and early childhood can affect the risk of developing common non-communicable diseases during adulthood such as obesity and metabolic syndrome. To support positive long-term out-comes, it is essential to debunk fake news and provide evidence-based nutritional recommenda-tions. “Nutripedia-Informati per Crescere” is a new tool delivering information and education on appropriate nutrition of mothers and babies during pregnancy and the first years of life. (2) Meth-ods. Nutripedia provides the readers with evidence-based scientific contents in an easy-to-access fashion through a website, a social media page and a personalized advice app called “Nutripedia Chatbot”. (3) Results. Forty articles were published on Nutripedia website with more than 220,000 total views. Social channel activation via bloggers reached over 9 million parents. 14,698 users downloaded Nutripedia chatbot, through which a total of 1930 questions were directed to experts while over 24,000 responses were provided by the app. (4) Conclusion. The use of different commu-nication tools delivering evidence-based nutritional information such as Nutripedia is increasing and could offer supportive strategies to provide scientific information to large audiences and con-tribute fighting fake news. Future research could investigate the effectiveness of this important health campaign.