Background: Understanding factors that influence healthy eating can inform design of culturally tailored interventions. The objective of this study was to examine whether exposure to food and nutrition information could influence healthy eating when the exposure is unintentional. In particularParticularly, the present study examined body comparison, body satisfaction, and body mass index (BMI) as three potential mechanisms linking food and nutrition information scanning to healthy eating.

Methods: A sample of 440 online participants (mean age = 29.15 years) were involved in this study. This study investigates: (1) how information scanning (IS), namely unintentional exposure to food and nutrition information, affects healthy eating (HE); (2) how the ISàHE effect is mediated by body comparison (BC); (3) how the possible ISàBCàHE mediation is moderated by body satisfaction (BS) or body mass index (BMI).

Results: Findings of this study shows positive and sizable ISàHE total effect – a whole-scale increase in information scanning is associated with a substantial increase in healthy eating by 15 percentage points (b_p=0.150), and an average amount of information scanning is linked with a considerable boost in healthy eating by 12.5 percent (a_p=0.125). BC is found to mediate the ISàHE relation in an all-positive complementary mediation. Both the direct and indirect paths show sizable effects. The mediated path contributes about 20% of the ISàHE total effect (c_p=20%), while the direct path contributes the rest (c_p=80%). Body satisfaction (BS) was found to moderate ISàBC relation, the first leg of the mediation. The moderation effect is large – the ISàBC effect is significantly smaller on the highly and the lowly satisfied than on the moderately satisfied (slope differential b_p=-.60). BMI was found to moderate the (ISàHE)/BC direct effect. That is, the ISàHE effect, after filtering out the mediated effect through BC, is significantly larger for those with unhealthy body weights than for the healthier participants (slope differential b_p=.32).

Conclusions: The findings offer important practical implications for health initiatives to promote healthy eating behaviors.