Abstract:

Individuals whose lifestyles have become modernized with the progress of technology move less and consume less calorie. In addition, rapid changes in diets together with the economic development and globalization have also caused changes in individuals’ feeding habits. Fast-food-style nutrition has increased the calorie intake even further. In this sense, today obesity has become an important public health problem, which concerns all age groups and has a prevalence increasing every passing day. Accordingly, it is also very important to raise awareness of obesity in people. The basic function of health communication is to raise awareness of individuals with accurate information about health matters and develop the community health by directing individuals toward accurate behaviors. A great part of society applies the information they get about health from the media instead of healthcare professionals. However, the media usually commercializes miraculous foods, miraculous applications, so-called effective diet programs and feeding habits encouraging consumption or lifestyle changes instead of raising awareness in people. In this study aiming to reveal the presentation of obesity in internet news; the data (n=209) acquired as a result of screening the term “obesity” on the web page of Sabah and Yeni Şafak newspapers for three months were examined using the content analysis method. The data were analyzed with the “SPSS 22.0” packaged software after being coded with a researcher and a coder on a coding form which was prepared by the researcher. The data were analyzed using arithmetic mean, standard deviation, frequency, and chi-square (X2) test.

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