Nutrition Commons^™

Nutrition Literacy: Foundations And Development Of An Instrument For Assessment, Heather Diane Gibbs

Faculty Scholarship – Family and Consumer Science

Health literacy has emerged as an area of increasing research focus in the medical literature, yet it has received little attention in the nutrition literature. Registered dietitians (RDs) should be concerned about low health literacy considering its associations with decreased knowledge of disease and management, increased hospitalizations, decreased use of preventive care services, and increased cost of health care. Thus, this research attempts to apply the concept of health literacy into the context of nutrition.

Investigation into whether RDs screen for health literacy and/or adjust teaching methods for different level learners revealed that 79.2% (n=99) of RDs surveyed (n=125) did …