Consumer Behavior Towards Healthy Food Choices: The Role of Digital Marketing and Nutritional Awareness

Abstract

Consumer decisions about food are increasingly shaped not only by taste, price, and habit, but by a dense information environment of digital marketing and nutrition communication. This paper presents an integrative conceptual review of social science and consumer behavior research on healthy food choice, with particular attention to two forces reshaping that choice: digital marketing (social media advertising, influencer endorsement, algorithmically targeted content, and mobile applications) and nutritional awareness (consumers’ knowledge of, and attentiveness to, nutritional information). Literature was identified through a structured search of Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar covering 2010–2025, screened against explicit inclusion criteria, and synthesized thematically. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the Health Belief Model, and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the paper develops an integrative framework in which digital marketing exposure and nutritional literacy jointly — and sometimes contradictorily — shape attitudes, subjective norms, perceived Behavioural control, and ultimately food choice behavior. Four testable propositions are derived and depicted in a conceptual model. The model advances existing research in three respects: it specifies nutritional literacy as a moderator rather than a direct determinant of marketing effects; it identifies elaboration likelihood as the mechanism that determines when that protective effect holds and when it collapses; and it treats digital platforms as a reciprocal channel that both markets food and supplies the nutrition knowledge assumed to protect against marketing. Practically, the review argues that nutrition education delivered as information alone is insufficient: media literacy components, influencer disclosure enforcement, and platform-level restrictions on targeted food advertising are identified as the highest-priority interventions. Implications for health communicators, marketers of healthier products, and policymakers are discussed, alongside a research agenda for empirical validation.