Food literacy and its implications for dietary behaviours

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, entitled “Food literacy and its implications for dietary behaviours” welcomes the submission of manuscripts describing original research (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods), and reviews (systematic, scoping, narrative). Food literacy is a topic of growing interest within the fields of nutrition and public health, with attention paid to the role that it may play in mediating dietary intake and, potentially, in building resiliency to food environments that offer foods not promoted as part of healthy eating patterns (e.g., those high in energy, sugars, and sodium). In the past few years, there have been efforts to conceptualize food literacy as a concept that is broader than but encompasses skills related to food preparation and food management. Emerging frameworks have emphasized the complexity of food literacy and its links with ecological factors, such as the social determinants of health and food environments. For example, food literacy may be desirable but is not sufficient to enable healthy eating in the absence of food security or in food environments that do not provide healthy options. Further, the role of food literacy as a component of initiatives to reduce food waste among consumers in the absence of concerted efforts at other levels of the food system remains unclear. Research is needed to conceptualize food literacy and the onus that it places on individuals versus society to improve eating patterns and their health and environmental impacts, the links between food literacy and food security and related issues, and approaches to measurement.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Conceptualization and measurement of food literacy
• Food literacy and its links to dietary intake and other dietary behaviours
• Links between food literacy and other food-related issues, such as food security and environmental sustainability
• Evaluations of interventions on food literacy, dietary behaviours, food waste, and other factors.

Dr. Sharon Kirkpatrick
Prof. Danielle Gallegos
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Nutrients is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.