Framing dietary patterns in professional sources of web genres : verbal and visual modes of communication

Over the last few years, the need to address public health issues has been very high on the governments' (national and international) political agendas, and researchers have focused on understanding the important social factors that affect people's health. In conjunction with these factors, the fluid and fast-paced arena of Internet communication has opened up new opportunities for online discourse where greater emphasis is placed on healthy eating behaviors and quality of life through a variety of professional document genres. With these Internet genres under focus, the aim of this study is to examine how healthy eating patterns and lifestyles for people are discursively constructed in professional sources of web genres. To this end, the study focuses on the Diet and Well-being for a Healthy Life professional document genre published on the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation's (BCFN Foundation) website in 2012. The importance of this textual source for case study lies in its status as accredited professional artefact produced by the BCFN Foundation, which acts as an information resource and as a bridge between both science and research by collecting knowledge and expertise in focus areas that form the subject of scientific publications, recommendations and debates. The chosen document for analysis, based on the genre's criteria of purpose and form, therefore provides a useful material for understanding how BCFN researchers illustrate and communicate the target issues. Using the methodological frameworks of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Van Leeuwen 2005, Jewitt 2009; Kress 2010) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Fairclough 2010), we examine elements of verbal communication that contribute to an understanding of the meanings and social significance of text alongside elements of visual communication. While still maintaining a broad orientation to the CDA dimensions of discourse practice and socio-cultural practice of communicative events, our principal study of the formal dimension of text in areas of language and imagery elucidates the formation of social identities and social relations along with the ideological underpinnings of social practices in discourse contexts. Through explication of the different multimodal elements of communicative utterances, our analysis shows that healthy eating patterns and quality of life are complex issues linked to wider social, cultural, political, economic and environmental arguments. Indeed, multimodal texts used for dealing with such global issues make an impact on behaviour change and resultant health outcomes, and discursively imply that individuals should engage with a range of health care practices, including healthier diets and controlling non-communicable diseases. From this perspective, engaging individuals with modifications in dietary behaviors for healthy lifestyles and social practices involves structuring the discourses of health and science as is necessary to emphasize certain values and ideologies, and the scientific knowledge gained about the interactions between nutrients and health-related issues is relevant to highlight how effective the value of health promotion is for an individual person, and consequently generate a health-conscious identity and improved living conditions within and across multimodal discourses.