Nutrition and health informatics

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of peop le across the globe. The areas of nutrition and health are among the fastes t growing areas of interest on the Internet, and are the main topics many p eople search for when 'surfing' the Internet. As the information age progre sses, consumers will become more health literate and health professionals w ill have to ensure they can provide advice as to how their patients can fin d reliable web sites among the many misleading and biased sites on the Inte rnet, This paper predicts the role the Internet will soon play in everyday life, and provides a guide to assessing the reliability of health and nutri tion web sites. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.