(P12-006-24) Trust in Nutritional Science is Moderately High but Depends on Political and Religious Beliefs

Objectives: There is limited peer-reviewed research exploring trust in nutritional science. Given the importance of trust in health scientists on the amount of attention paid to guidelines and participation in healthy behaviors, it’s important to understand how the public trusts our field. We address this gap by studying how trust in nutritional science is moderated by demographics such as political and religious beliefs and by comparing trust in nutritional science to other scientific fields that study our food system.

Methods: We surveyed 400 Americans via an online survey through Prolific. Respondents answered 5-point Likert-items about trust in different fields of sciences (i.e., nutrition, food, agriculture, and environment). Four Likert-items were used to construct a Likert-scale for each field (1 = completely distrust, 5 = completely trust). Besides trust, we also measured potentially moderating sociodemographic factors and beliefs (i.e., politics, religion) that previous research on trust in science have shown to be relevant. Preliminary analysis includes descriptive statistics (means (±SD)) and tests of the trust scales’ internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha).

Results: Trust in nutritional science (3.83 (±0.86)) was comparable to trust in food (3.85 (±0.84)), agricultural (3.98 (±0.84)), and environmental (4.02 (±0.94)) sciences. However, the most politically liberal and non-religious individuals reported higher levels of trust in all sciences (range from 3.96 (±0.84) to 4.55 (±0.43)) compared to the most politically conservative and highly religious individuals (range from 2.57 (±0.84) to 3.58 (±0.98)). Our scales of trust in science have good internal consistency based on Cronbach’s alpha scores which ranged from 0.85 to 0.92.

Conclusions: Trust in the field of nutritional science is moderately high and consistent with other agri-food-related scientific fields. Religious and political beliefs are important predictors of trust, where more politically liberal and non-religious individuals report higher trust in science. This is consistent with trends from studies on trust in science more broadly. Future research should explore differences in trust depending on the practitioner of nutritional science (i.e., scientist, nutritionist, dietitian, etc.).

Funding Sources: National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (DataFEWSion)