Effects of Web-Based Nutrition Counseling on Dietary Behavior and Food Intake in Hyperlipidemic Patients

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the web-based nutrition counseling on the dietary behavior and food intake of hyperlipidemic patients and to evaluate the web-based nutrition counseling program. Forty hyperlipidemic patients, twenty of them were hypercholesterolemia and the other twenty were hypertriglyceridemia, participated in the web-based nutrition counseling program. At the first nutrition counseling, the patients were interviewed and then follow-up nutrition counselings were accomplished four times during eight weeks through a web-based internet program. The web-based nutrition counseling program was consisted of diet management, nutrition education and nutritional assessment and the follow-up counseling program. The dietary behavior score increased significantly in both groups after the nutrition counseling program(p<0.01). The diet therapy knowledge score also increased significantly (p<0.01). For food frequency, vegetable (p<0.01), fruit (p<0.05) and seaweed (p<0.01) consumption increased significantly, while meat (p<0.01), egg (p<0.01), snack (p<0.01) and instant food (p<0.01) intake decreased significantly in both groups after the nutrition counseling program. The evaluation of the web-based nutrition counseling program by the patients showed above average in all domains, specially the evaluation scores of younger aged patients habituated to practice computer were better than those of older aged patients. Therefore, this study shows that the web-based nutrition counseling program is effective for improving dietary behavior and food consumption the patients. In addition, these results indicate that internet presents us with potential as a new medium for nutrition counseling in informationized society.