Abstract:

The mass media convey ideas and promote unhealthy behaviours related to body image and nutrition. Sociocultural pressures to adhere to an ideal body image transmitted by media is a suggested cause for the large amount of body dissatisfaction and eating problems in industrialized societies. Sociocultural influences include the media, peers, and family. However, the greatest amount of sociocultural pressure to conform to an ideal body image comes from the media.
The impact of the media is particularly important among children and youth. The increasing prevalence of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders among children requires the inclusion of nutrition education programs in teacher training.
Of particular concern is the likelihood of the teachers’ inappropriate attitudes and behaviours being conveyed to their school students. Furthermore, the presence of body dissatisfaction and eating problems among women future elementary teachers requires the implementation of programs during their own preservice university training.
Different studies have examined the effectiveness of different approaches of nutrition education programs, being media literacy interventions one of the most effective.
In this paper we describe and evaluate a nutrition education program based on media literacy for preservice elementary teachers we have implemented at the School of Education in Vitoria. The principal objective of our intervention has been focused on building critical attitudes towards the media that can help to reduce their effects on the ideas, attitudes and behaviours related to nutrition, decreasing the influence of images of thin female body ideal on the different factors associated with eating disorders.
We applied an interactive method which focused on the use of the different resources of Moodle platform. Of special interest have been the various forums where the students can share opinions, ideas and materials obtained mostly from the internet
The different contributions from the students (opinions, ideas, computer presentations, advertisement analysis and elaboration) are analysed, as well as the working sessions in the classroom and on the network, and the results of several questionnaires on eating attitudes, body image and sociocultural influences.

Keywords:

Nutrition education, media education, preservice teacher education.