Investigation on Improving Knowledge of Fruits and Vegetables by Online Survey of WeChat

Objectives  To study the role of WeChat online survey for improving the awareness rate of vegetable and fruit nutrition knowledge.

Methods  Through the official wechat public platform, a six-day contest of vegetable and fruit nutrition knowledge was conducted for WeChat users at the same time, and the awareness of relevant knowledge among different genders, ages, education levels and regional respondents was analyzed and compared, as well as the improvement of the accuracy of multiple responses.

Results  A total of 5 052 participants participated in the contest. The first correct answers of vegetables with high vitamin C content and vegetables and fruits with high dietary fiber in all questions are relatively low, with the correct rates of 39.02%, 40.90% and 44.03%, respectively. There are statistical differences (χ²: 4.70-258.90, P ＜ 0.05) in the accuracy of answers of the vegetables and fruits with high carotene content, fruits with high potassium content and the wrong statement of fruits and their products in WeChat users of different genders, ages, education levels and regions. After many times of random questions answering, the correct rate of all questions increased, the correct rate of the knowledge of vegetables with high content of carotene increased to 80.72%, and that of vegetables with high content of vitamin C had increased to 44.65%. There were significant differences in the accuracy of the participants with different response times (χ²: 102.86-419.08, P ＜ 0.05).

Conclusions  The knowledge of vegetable and fruit nutrition of users of the platform needs to be further improved. Through the use of the official WeChat platform of professional institutions, the public education of WeChat terminal has been conducted for different groups for many times, which is conducive to the improvement of their nutritional knowledge and the improvement of the nutrition literacy level of the whole people.