Connecting digital food literacy and sustainable eating in children and adolescents: a focused mini review of evidence gaps and educational priorities

Abstract

Children and adolescents learn about food through digital and physical environments while developing an understanding of dietary effects on human and planetary health. Digital healthy-eating education, food-literacy education, and sustainable-diet education have nevertheless developed along largely separate trajectories. This focused Mini Review examines interventions that combine a substantive digital educational mechanism, a food-literacy capacity, and an explicit sustainability target in young people. Database-specific searches of Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and ERIC plus citation checking yielded three eligible studies; exploratory high-sensitivity checks did not reveal an evident additional match. The studies evaluated an adolescent food-systems simulation with guided inquiry, online family cooking with text-message support, and a seven-mission family mHealth program addressing food waste and plant-based proteins. They provide preliminary evidence for three educational configurations rather than a basis for comparative effectiveness claims. Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool assessment identified credible alignment between questions and data, alongside immediate qualitative outcomes, single-arm designs, selective outcome completion, and limited control of confounding. The synthesis distinguishes food literacy delivered through digital media—the eligibility construct—from critical literacy about digital food environments, which remains a proposed research direction. Current evidence supports explicit specification of digital affordance, literacy capacity, sustainability target, participant role, outcome tier, and inferential strength. Future trials should recruit more diverse populations, strengthen child-led participation, separate child and household outcomes, and test longer-term behavioral and material effects.