A social cognitive theory and theory of planned behavior-based serial multiple mediation model of social media-related factors and eating behaviors among sports science students.

Résumé

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Social media has become a pervasive digital environment closely associated with individuals' dietary preferences, eating attitudes, and consumption behaviors. Although prior research has documented associations between social media use and eating behaviors, the underlying cognitive, attitudinal, and psychological mechanisms remain insufficiently clarified, particularly among university students. Accordingly, this study examines the serial mediating roles of digital healthy nutrition literacy, attitudes toward functional foods, food craving acceptance, and emotional eating in the relationship between social media use and eating behaviors.METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted with 1,576 sports sciences students from 38 public universities in Türkiye. Sports science students were selected because of their high engagement with health-related content, intensive social media exposure, and potential future role in promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors. Data were collected using validated instruments. The proposed serial multiple mediation model was tested using PROCESS Macro (Model 6) with 5,000 bootstrap resamples.RESULTS: Social media-related factors were significantly associated with e-healthy diet literacy ( = 0.31,