Assessment of the Quality and Reliability of Information on Nutrition for Patients with Diabetes on YouTube

Abstract

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy, and the quality of the information of the videos about diabetes and nutrition on YouTube. Subjects/Methods: Using the keywords "diabetic diet" and "nutrition of diabetic patient", a search was conducted on YouTube, and the first 100 videos for each keyword, 200 videos in total were analyzed. The popularity of the videos was calculated using the video power index (VPI) and view rates. Among these 200 videos, 32 were non-English videos, 36 were nonnutritional videos, and 38 were duplicate videos. The quality and the accuracy of the information was evaluated using the DISCERN score, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) score, the Global Quality Score (GQS), the usefulness score, and a novel diabetic diet score (DDS). SPSS 20 was used for statistical analysis. Results: Physician, dietitian, commercial, and patient-sourced videos differed significantly in DISCERN, GQS, and usefulness scores (p<0.05). In the DISCERN, GQS, and usefulness scores, physician sourced videos had statistically higher scores than commercial-sourced videos (.0125). A significant and positive correlation was found between view ratio and video power index. Besides, there was a statistically significant and positive correlation between the number of views and DISCERN, JAMA, GQS, usefulness score and DDS, while a positive correlation was found between number of likes and video strength indexes (p <0.001). Conclusions: It has been observed that videos on nutrition for diabetic patients on YouTube are of low quality in terms of quality and reliability.