Robert and Bob, community nutritionists for a large metropolitan area, have developed a program to improve health-related media literacy among middle school children.

Please respond to the following Discussion Paragraph with a follow up response: 

Discussion question: Robert and Bob, community nutritionists for a large metropolitan area, have developed a program to improve health-related media literacy among middle school children. How can a media literacy program be tied to a positive impact on nutrition? 

Discussion Paragraph: 

Classic novels have been a major tool to impact young children in a school setting. However, although those resources work, the modern world of media has also been proven to make a huge impact on adolescence. (Brown, 2006) A few behaviors that have been impacted by media include sexual, body satisfaction and eating disorders. These behaviors do impact health directly, and by broadening that information about more nutrition related topics, adolescence may further better their health. However, it is important to understand the target population for this program, and develop the information to meet their current level of media literacy. Fortunately technology has greatly improved and it is very simple and cost efficient to create creative and informative teaching tools. A good strategy for this program would be to have different literacy level options to keep adolescents at different levels engaged and learning at their own level. Nutrition information can easily be made into interactive games or videos for children. In today’s modern time, Tik Tok is starting to be the preferred search engine over google for individuals born after 1997 (Dobuski, 2022). This is a great example of how using new media as an advantage for learning, even efforts as simple as creating short videos about nutrition can reach a bigger audience and make a bigger impact in this program. Similarly, Robert and Bob should take into account that every individual has different media learning preferences just like individuals have different learning methods like visual, audio, etc. Developing different forms of nutrition media would help adolescents retain information better if there is a different form of media that meets their preferences. As previously mentioned, it is very simple and cheap to develop different media sources thanks to technological advances.