THE QUALITY OF DIETARY INFORMATION ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

Dietary information an the World Wide Web (WWW) is vast, diverse and d etermined solely by the organizations and individuals who publish it. To evaluate the accuracy of nutrition information on the internet, a s urvey of WWW sites that provided dietary recommendations were reviewed and compared to the Canadian Guidelines for Healthy Eating and Nutrit ion Recommendations for Canadians. Web sites were accessed through ''d iet'', ''food'' and ''nutrition'' keyword searches. Of the 365 documen ts accessed, 167 contained dietary recommendations. Forty-five per ten t (n=76) of these provided information that was not consistent with on e or more of the Canadian dietary guidelines and included information in the forms of advertisements recommending supplements, herbal remedi es, weight loss products and promotion of specific diets. The total nu mber of web sites that provided information that was inconsistent with Canadian guidelines per each keyword search was 25 (29.8%) for ''diet '', 11 (13.1%)for ''food'' and 48 (57.1%) for ''nutrition''. Sources o f differing information included individual web pages (n=31, 40.8%), p rivate vendors (n=44, 57.9%) and health organizations (n=1, 1.3%). Bec ause Internet resources continue to increase at on incredible pale, nu trition professionals need to take on active role in this technology a nd develop strategies to address inconsistent or questionable dietary information provided through this avenue.