Social Media

Master of Public Health student advocates for community health as This is Public Health ambassador

John Brandon Cantrell — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:34:13 +0000

Master of Public Health student advocates for community health as This is Public Health ambassador John Brandon C… Mon, 09/26/2022 - 09:34

Explore Mason's MPH Program

Topics

Public Health

This is Public Health

Jacqueline Clabeaux led an inclusive social media campaign on the value of exercise in the public’s health for the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH).

Jacqueline Clabeaux , MPH 2023

Master of Public Health (MPH) student Jacqueline Clabeaux knows that leading communities to practice healthier lifestyles is a key role for public health professionals. That’s why she focused her ASPPH This is Public Health (TIPH) Student Ambassador social media campaign on educating people on how to improve their health while strengthening their local communities through physical activities.

“When public health is working at its full capacity, that’s when you see the most inclusiveness within communities and populations because everyone is on board to solve a problem and make their community a better place,” Clabeaux said. “I knew that most people understood what exercise is and how it impacts your body, so I took another approach and focused on how exercise can impact populations and communities.”

Clabeaux, a student-athlete for Mason’s swim team, concentrated her campaign on community building after learning from her MPH coursework that community is an essential factor in an individual’s life and health. Her campaign educated TIPH’s 30,000 followers about how they can improve their community’s health through more physical activity, such as working out in a community gym or swimming pool, exploring scenery in local neighborhoods, and spending time with others while exercising. These types of activities support individuals’ physical, behavioral, and emotional health.

Uplifting Community Health

Her week-long takeover on TIPH’s Instagram and Twitter accounts consisted of graphics on how exercise impacted her life and how exercise aids the public’s health. She also provided ideas to encourage others to exercise within their community. In doing this, she considered physical differences and community demographics to ensure her campaign was inclusive of diverse populations.

“If you live in an area where health resources are scarce, there is a higher chance that this can negatively impact your life compared to areas where health resources are abundant,” Clabeaux said. “If I could spread awareness about exercise and how it can impact communities, there is hope that this topic can build upon a community’s overall health.”

Clabeaux continued, “I wanted to make exercise look more fun to engage in and potentially entice other people to build a network of people to exercise with and that people can look at exercise in a different and fun way that can make an entire community healthier and happier.”

Students who pursue a TIPH student ambassadorship lead national presentations and campaigns to raise awareness of public health education, careers, and issues. In the past, Mason’s TIPH student ambassadors led awareness campaigns on growing a career in public health and bringing attention to the historical public health disparities affecting specific populations.

Moving Forward

For Clabeaux, being a TIPH student ambassador was a rewarding experience where she could grow as a public health professional.

“The most important lesson I learned is how to be more inclusive with how I word my posts,” Clabeaux said. “For example, some people do not have the ability to work out due to physical limitations, disabilities, etc., so I had to make sure that I was using inclusive words so that everyone would benefit from my posts.”

After graduating with her Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in epidemiology in 2023, Clabeaux aspires to continue her education and become a physician’s assistant, a career where she will help communities learn the value of exercising to improve their health and aid in disease prevention.

“I’ve had a passion for the medical field since I was very young, and my goal was always to become a medical professional of some sort when I was older,” said Clabeaux. “I found that the human body is capable of many extraordinary things, and I would love to learn as much as I can about our bodies and share it with others.”

Global and Community Health Students ‘Take Over’ This is Public Health’s Social Media

John Brandon Cantrell — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 14:23:19 +0000

Global and Community Health Students ‘Take Over’ This is Public Health’s Social Media John Brandon C… Tue, 02/08/2022 - 09:23

In honor of Black History Month, McNally and Harmon highlight Black contributions and historical moments in health care

Future public health leaders in the Department of Global and Community Health bring awareness to health disparities affecting underserved communities through education, research, and advocacy. Public Health PhD student Kimberly McNally and Master of Public Health student Danielle Harmon lead by example by serving as student ambassadors for This is Public Health (TIPH), a student-centered organization from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) that provides leadership experience opportunities to public health scholars across the country.

As TIPH ambassadors, McNally and Harmon will each create week-long social media campaigns, referred to as Ambassador Takeovers, that center around a public health topic of their choice. They strategically chose their Ambassador Takeovers to occur in February to raise awareness of historical moments in health care in honor of Black History Month.

McNally, a registered nurse, created her campaign to highlight Black health care heroes who, while often overlooked in nursing textbooks, made substantial contributions to the nursing field.

Public Health PhD student Kim McNally

“To celebrate Black History Month, I am focusing on community health nurses that broke boundaries despite discrimination and barriers,” McNally said. “I am honored to post about community health nurses like Jessie Sleet Scales and Mabel Keaton Staupers. It is important to both public health and nursing to celebrate the pioneers who advocated for their communities and their profession. Their contributions improved our understanding and delivery of culturally competent care.”

The following week, Harmon’s campaign brings attention to the social determinants of health affecting Black communities throughout the nation.

Master of Public Health student Danielle Harmon

“I plan to bring attention to monumental moments of history such as redlining and radicalized residential segregation to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that has left the Black community feeling distrustful and at a disadvantage in health care,” said Harmon. “My goal is not just to show how Black people are disproportionately affected but also show how intertwined each of the risk factors is for many of the diseases that affect the Black community at an irregular rate compared to White America.”

The Department of Global and Community Health inspires students to be leaders in their fields. Students accomplish this through interprofessional networking and applying their skill set to educate others through projects and initiatives, such as TIPH. For McNally and Harmon, the TIPH experience, coupled with their Mason coursework, allows them to gain the skills needed to pursue their career goals as health care leaders.

McNally said her student experiences have transformed her outlook on global health and will benefit her future career as a nursing educator. “My TIPH experience and my Mason coursework have challenged me to think beyond my role and identity as a nurse. I am now able to see health from a bigger perspective, and I have also had the opportunity to learn from student and faculty experiences. I will leave Mason as a better clinician and a more well-rounded educator.”

Harmon will apply the skills she is learning to pursue a health policy analyst career after completing her degree.

“My TIPH involvement [gives] me an array of experience from working collaboratively with people from different backgrounds, collecting information to develop engaging materials for a broad audience, and the ability to put forth accredited materials to help bring awareness to health topics,” said Harmon. “I am very confident that the rest of my coursework at Mason will give me the foundation and building blocks to a successful career in health policy by giving me the knowledge needed to analyze, write, and develop health policies.”

To view McNally and Harmon's social media campaigns, visit This is Public Health on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Topics

Social Determinants of Health

Department of Global and Community Health

Student Spotlight

Mason researchers partner with a community-based organization to develop the first social media-based intervention to promote Hepatitis B screening among Korean Americans

John Brandon Cantrell — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 13:47:36 +0000

Mason researchers partner with a community-based organization to develop the first social media-based intervention to promote Hepatitis B screening among Korean Americans John Brandon C… Thu, 02/03/2022 - 08:47

Culturally-targeted social media campaign increases HBV awareness among Korean Americans, one of the highest risk groups for an HBV infection.

The Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is the leading cause of cirrhosis and primary liver cancer, globally affecting nearly 300 million people. In the United States, Asian Americans account for 7% of the total population, but more than 50% of all HBV infections. Foreign-born Asian Americans face tremendous barriers to HBV screening, vaccination, and treatment because of lack of HBV-related knowledge, stigma, and limited access to health care due to language barriers and immigrant status.

There are limited culturally-tailored linguistically-appropriate interventions to promote HBV screening among Asian Americans. To address this public health need, ��ӽ紫ý researchers Dr. Alicia Hong, professor of Health Administration and Policy; Dr. Sojung Claire Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Communication; Dr. Pramita Bagchi, assistant professor in the Department of Statistics; and the Korean American Outreach Group collaboratively developed “Let’s talk about liver cancer,” a mHealth (mobile health) program for Korean Americans.

“The high prevalence of HBV infection and liver cancer mortality rates in Asian Americans is one of the most neglected and understudied cancer disparities,” said Hong. “We advocate for more research and practice to deliver culturally-tailored public health programs for underserved populations via social media apps used by the target groups.”

Most HBV-infected individuals are not aware of their condition because of its asymptomatic nature. Due to high rates of chronic HBV infection, Asian Americans have the highest liver cancer incidence and mortality rates of all racial or ethnic groups. HBV prevalence in Asian Americans is 10 times that of non-Hispanic White Americans (NHW). Asian American liver cancer mortality rates are two-to-three times that of NHW counterparts. Ninety-one percent of Asian Americans living with HBV are foreign-born.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, researchers seek to increase digital intervention in campaigns that previously had been community-based and in-person. The “Let’s talk about liver cancer” campaign was delivered via Kakao Talk, a social media app used by more than 95% of Koreans. The campaign was a four-week program that consisted of social video clips and pictorial messages tailored for Korean Americans with limited English proficiency and low level of health literacy. The program was adapted from a previous Centers for Disease Control HBV mass-media campaign.

“This is one of the first social media-based liver cancer prevention programs designed specifically for Korean Americans,” Hong remarked. “It’s amazing that we successfully piloted it during the pandemic, as it was delivered via a popular social media app.”

The paper, “Social media-based intervention to promote HBV screening and liver cancer prevention among Korean Americans: Results of a pilot study,” was published in Digital Health.

Hong led a multidisciplinary team to pilot test the campaign among 100 Korean Americans with 84% having limited English proficiency. The intervention had a 95% retention rate and significantly improved participants’ HBV-related knowledge, liver cancer prevention knowledge, perceived benefits of HBV testing, perceived risks of HBV infection, social norms of HBV testing, and self-efficacy of HBV testing. The results were comparable to the existing in-person community-based HBV promotion interventions.

Other team members in the study include Ms. Yee Soo of Korean American Outreach Group, Dr. Hee-soon Juon from Thomas Jefferson University, and Dr. Daisy Le from George Washington University. The team is thankful for the support from Korean American communities in the Greater Washington, D.C. area. The study was supported by the Potomac Health Foundation and a start-up fund grant from ��ӽ紫ý College of Health and Human Services. The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of ��ӽ紫ý.

Topics

Behavioral Intervention

Asian Americans

Hepatitis B

Center for Health Equity

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researchers address multidisciplinary challenges

Martha Bushong — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:19:34 +0000

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researchers address multidisciplinary challenges Martha Bushong Wed, 01/26/2022 - 15:19

In This Story

Whether you are an experienced software developer, a teen texting on a smartphone, or an older adult checking a bank statement, cybersecurity is part of your life. Humans and computers interact every minute of every day and cybersecurity is there to keep information safe and actions private. But normal human behavior can compromise safety and privacy.

For the next 12 months, researchers funded by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative’s (CCI) Northern Virginia Node (NoVa Node) will be exploring the impact of human behavior on cybersecurity systems. Divided into six teams, the researchers will seek to leverage the power of their academic expertise in the social sciences, and related fields. The teams include faculty from the Colleges of Engineering and Computing, Humanities and Social Sciences, Education and Human Development, and the School of Business. Each team will explore a different aspect of the problem as they aim to translate those understandings into solutions or areas for additional investigation that can impact the welfare of Virginians.

“Human-Centric Training for Privacy and Security Controls: Bridging the Awareness Gap for Diverse Populations”

PI: Vivian Genero Motti, College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), ��ӽ紫ý; Co-PIs: Samy El-Tawab, and Ahmad Salman, College of Integrated Sciences, James Madison University

If you retired from the workforce 25 years ago, before Wi-Fi, online shopping, banking, or smartphones, you are likely more vulnerable to cyberattacks. In fact, older adults face a disproportionate risk of suffering cyberattacks; still, they do not have access to resources and educational materials suitable to meet their needs related to human behavior and privacy protection.

Vivian Motti and her team want to do something about that. They plan to reach out to underrepresented users and characterize their level of awareness about cybersecurity. Motti and her team believe that gaining a better understanding of these populations will help inform educational content development, providing content, language, and design aspects that are all suitable to their specific user profiles.

“By adopting a user-centric design approach, this project will ensure that cybersecurity training meets users' needs for minority groups. By involving older adults front and center in the research agenda, we will establish training contents that are appropriate to their level of understanding,” says Motti. Also, besides following the training contents and retaining what they learn, they will be able to act and prevent potential attacks that could pose privacy risks.

“Impact of Human Behavior in a Mixed Traffic Environment”

PI: Linghan Zhang, CEC; Co-PIs: Nirup Menon, School of Business, Nupoor Ranade, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS),

As autonomous vehicles become more prevalent and mingle with human-driven vehicles this mixed traffic environment may comprise both. In mixed traffic, the behaviors of human drivers are unpredictable and can lead to situations that confuse autonomous vehicles and cause adverse events for both.

The CCI NoVa Node’s research in autonomous vehicles (AVs) has already garnered attention from vehicle manufacturers such as Ford, Cadillac, and Daimler-Benz. Linghan Zhang and her team aim to extend that research by studying their use in mixed traffic.

According to Linghan, the team’s goal is to reflect driving reality through a multi-vehicle simulation in mixed traffic, using driving conditions that have led to real-world collisions in the past. She says, “Prior research only focuses on a single user’s behavior, and the data collected is mainly limited to surveys and interviews. With objective driving data missing, prior experiments did not reflect on-road driving reality.”

This project could achieve valuable and meaningful data on how human driver behaviors affect other components in mixed driving environments, especially in security- and safety-critical contexts when human errors are inevitable as well as uncover what humans need to know while driving alongside AVs. The team expects that the results will be significant for autonomous vehicle implementation and policymaking.

“Towards Building Cyber-Security Resilience in a COVID-Induced Virtual Workplace”

PI: Amitava Dutta; Co-PI: Pallab Sanyal, School of Business, ��ӽ紫ý

Before COVID-19 rocked our world, individuals and businesses were already increasing their online presence. The pandemic accelerated the speed forcing a change. People who were not comfortable in the online environment were made to go online and people who were already comfortable expanded their online presence to areas that they had previously conducted in person.

“In short, COVID-19 has caused a shift from organizational ecosystems to a virtual workplace for employees, which has opened multiple vectors for cyberattacks,” says Amitava Duta, professor at the School of Business. “Our research focuses on the behavioral and organizational aspects of cybersecurity and is motivated by the ongoing transformations following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In their project, the team will investigate the significant changes in online behavior following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic are. They expect their insights will help organizations build greater cyber-security resilience in a virtual workplace.

Because Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia are home to prominent financial services organizations these businesses would have a strong interest in strengthening their cybersecurity posture to address its behavioral aspects. Soon, Amazon will also have a significant presence and retail online sales is another area frequently targeted by cybercriminals. If organizations would be willing to provide data on customer behavior on their website, the models developed from the team’s work could be refined and tailored for an important application domain.

“Characterizing and Countering User Security Fatigue in Password Enhancement through Deep Learning”

PI: Gerald Matthews, CHSS, ��ӽ紫ý; Co-PIs: Giuseppe Anteniese and Daniel Barbará, CEC, ��ӽ紫ý

If you already have a demanding job, you might think maintaining security is an additional burden, and not keep up with cybersecurity best practices such as updating or changing your passwords.

Professor Giuseppe Ateniese has designed a tool for enhancing password strength, based on a deep learning approach, but psychological factors may limit the adoption and impact of the tool. Everyone can be vulnerable to security fatigue and lax cybersecurity practices can have major societal consequences—threats to national security, financial losses to individuals and organizations, and invasion of privacy.

Introducing security tools powered by Artificial Intelligence, when successful, will counteract typical human fallibilities and promote safety in computer systems across government, industry, and personal use. This project investigates the effect of security fatigue on the use of Anteniese’s tool. It will also explore strategies for mitigating fatigue and supporting user engagement.

The team believes that enhancing employees' ability and motivation to maintain effective security protocols has immediate economic benefits and the research has the potential to suggest design features of security tools that can support commercialization as well as training protocols.

“Enabling Invisible Security and Privacy for Resilient Human-Centric Cybersecurity Systems”

PI: Eric Osterweil, CEC, ��ӽ紫ý; Co-PI: Matt Canham, CHSS, ��ӽ紫ý

For decades, cryptography has been one of cybersecurity’s most essential tools. While its utility is certain, its complexity limits its use for non-experts. The result—non-experts fall prey to cybercriminals for many reasons including lack of knowledge, incorrect thought processes, and the inability to invest adequate time and resources to implement proper data protection.

Eric Osterweil and his co-investigator Matt Canham hope to change that through their work with the CCI NoVa Node. “This project will seed a critical foundation for adaptive cybersecurity protections for human users’ end-to-end encryption (E2EE) needs. The results from this project will be used as foundations for enhancing a core staple of Internet communications (email) and future advances in prescriptive protections for Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence (CTI) information sharing,” says Osterweil.

The CTI industry continues to grow, with companies, federal agencies, and international communities relying on CTI. In Virginia, where federal agencies and their partners routinely conduct transactions over email, this is especially true. Their view is that building human usable E2EE protections and extending those to adaptive CTI will be directly relevant to operational cybersecurity projects and needs throughout the industry and public sectors in Virginia.

The pair believes that a key benefit to the Commonwealth will include course-related exposure of this material to the students at ��ӽ紫ý. “Students will be able to showcase both the results of this work and their own derived qualifications to benefit their entry into local industry and jumpstart their ascension to professional careers,” says Osterweil.

"Characterizing Biases in Automated Scam Detection Tools for Social Media to Aid Individuals with Developmental Disabilities"

PI: Hemant Purohit, CEC; Co-PIs: Géraldine Walther, CHHS; Matt Peterson, CHHS; YooSun Chung, CEHD

Designers of scam detection tools often focus on improving the computational accuracy of the methods, especially those with state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques, but their understanding of the diverse human behavior can be limited. This project aims to build a foundation for inclusive cybersecurity technologies to protect individuals with disabilities from online scams using a unique interdisciplinary collaborative approach between computing and non-computing researchers.

Specifically, the team’s objective is to uncover the biases in the existing scam detection techniques for social media using NLP and ML methods. “We will conduct Eye Tracking analyses using a labeled scam dataset of social media posts from existing literature on online cybersecurity and study the differences between the attention patterns of individuals with and without developmental disabilities when perceiving scam posts,” says Hemant Purohit.

The project hopes to gain insights that will support cybersecurity training development for reducing online fraud for individuals with special education needs. At the same time, the researchers want to identify limitations in automated scam detection tools and help create more effective cybersecurity tools that can protect user groups in our communities.

Topics

Cybersecurity

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI)

Artificial Intellgence

cryptography

coronavirus; covid-19

Social Media

natural language processing

Research

Study Shows Link between Using Snapchat and Vaping in College Students

John Brandon Cantrell — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 13:05:03 +0000

Study Shows Link between Using Snapchat and Vaping in College Students John Brandon C… Tue, 09/14/2021 - 09:05

In This Story

Hong Xue, PhD

Alison Evans Cuellar, PhD, MBA

Lawrence J. Cheskin, MD

Each additional hour per day spent on Snapchat associated with a 4.61% increase in the probability of lifetime e-cigarette use.

Xue and his colleagues found that college-age e-cigarette users who spent more time on Snapchat had a higher prevalence of lifetime e-cigarette use as well as an increased frequency of e-cigarette use in the past 30 days. Photo Credit: Thought Catalog on Unsplash

As the Food and Drug Administration begins to issue rulings on the marketing and sale of e-cigarette products, health researchers are seeking more information on what influence, if any, social media use might have on vaping, especially among college students.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Associate Professor Hong Xue and Professors Alison Cuellar and Lawrence Cheskin in ��ӽ紫ý’s College of Health and Human Services, and colleagues examined associations between the amount of time spent on specific social media sites and the use of both e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes.

While most of the social media platforms reviewed in the study showed no significant association with vaping, Xue and his colleagues did find that college-age e-cigarette users who spent more time on Snapchat did have a higher prevalence of lifetime e-cigarette use as well as an increased frequency of e-cigarette use in the past 30 days.

College-age e-cigarette users who are occasional or regular vapers spend an average of just over two hours a day on Snapchat, according to the study. Non-users, on the other hand, spend less than an hour each day on the app. The study also found that each extra hour on Snapchat was associated with a 4.61 percent increase in likelihood of lifetime e-cigarette use.

“Our findings provide evidence of the important role that social media may play in promoting engagement in risky health behaviors for young adults, such as e-cigarette use,” says Xue. “Scientific evidence is urgently needed to inform interventions and policies that can reverse the trend.”

While traditional tobacco use among young people has declined over the years, estimates from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey showed that more than one in four high school students were current e-cigarette users. Those students, now in college, are also heavy social media users. A 2018 Pew Research Center study showed that 75 percent of young adults had used Instagram and 73 percent used Snapchat, with more than three-fourths of users aged 18 to 29 reporting that they use the apps daily.

The study also examined whether social media might influence traditional cigarette use. The research team did not find an association between cigarette smoking and any of the major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram.

The research team used data from the Mason: Health Starts Here cohort study for their observational study. The study included 298 first-year college students at a large state university. In addition to Cuellar, Cheskin, and Xue, the research team included Shuo-Yu Lin, Xiaolu Cheng, Matthew Rossheim, and Dustin Gress.

Topics

Social Media

Health Administration

New Study Shows Pinterest Users Pin Healthy Recipes But Are More Likely to Make the Unhealthy Ones

mthomp7 — Mon, 17 May 2021 11:38:44 +0000

New Study Shows Pinterest Users Pin Healthy Recipes But Are More Likely to Make the Unhealthy Ones mthomp7 Mon, 05/17/2021 - 07:38

In This Story

Hong Xue, PhD

Lawrence J. Cheskin, MD

Y. Alicia Hong, PhD

Janusz Wojtusiak, PhD

Study found that users liked and pinned posts that were healthy but more heavily engaged off-line with recipes that were high in fat, sugar, and total calories. Findings indicate that users were more like to actually cook the less healthy recipes.

New Study By Hong Xue Shows Pinterest Users Pin Healthy Recipes But Are More Likely to Make the Unhealthy Ones

When it comes sharing recipes on social media, what users post, and what they cook may be two entirely different things. That’s the conclusion of a recent study from ��ӽ紫ý’s College of Health and Human Services, published in April in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), a leading journal for digital medicine and health research. The study led by Hong Xue, PhD analyzed hundreds of Pinterest Users and Pinterest Influencers, and found users liked and pinned posts that were healthy, featuring more poultry, fish and vegetables, but users more heavily engaged off-line with recipes that were high in fat, sugar, and total calories – indicating that users were more like to actually cook the less healthy recipes.

“It’s an interesting discrepancy between what pinners posted/liked and how users actually consumed the information,” Xue said. “Pinners are more likely to post recipes that are socially rewarded with likes and repins. They are more likely to adhere to an elite social norm set by celebrities and influencers promoting healthier, low-calorie, clean eating. But when it comes to the recipes users are more interested in making food high in fat, sugar, and high calories. We see a very different picture. They’re commenting on and posting finished dish photos of the less healthy recipes.”

The disconnect between popularity and engagement is an important one, Xue noted, because users aren’t taking the additional step from interest to action. And that could have significant implications for anyone attempting to increase healthy eating behaviors through social media campaigns. Specifically, the study found:

Engagement (commenting, sharing photos of finished dishes) increased as the amount of fat, sugar, total calories increased in a recipe
Popularity (reposting, liking) of a recipe increased as the number of poultry and seafood went up in a recipe
Comment mining on recipe posts revealed that users were more likely to comment on the way a recipe tasted
Users were far less likely to comment on a recipe’s difficulty level (less than 8 percent) or its health attributes (less than 3 percent).

With 18 percent of the adult U.S. population using Pinterest, and recipe sharing being one of its most popular interest areas, the platform represents an unprecedented opportunity to reinforce healthy eating habits, Xue said, if Pinterest influencers posting recipes used some different strategies.

“If users are engaging with more unhealthy recipes, then perhaps influencers should offer options for lowering the fat in them, as part of those recipes. There’s definitely a role for healthcare organizations and fitness experts to provide healthier recipes that are big on flavor, as this appears to be an area where users find the recipes lacking. To change perceptions, public health experts need to make healthy food the treat, and not the other way around. There’s tremendous opportunities in social media to influence healthy behavior,” he said. “We’re only beginning to understand it’s potential and pitfalls.”

Fellow CHHS faculty Alicia Hong (HAP), Janusz Wojtusiak (HAP), and Lawrence Cheskin (NUTR) also collaborated on this study.

Topics