Analysis of information content and general quality of obesity and eating disorders websites

Introduction: nowadays, the Internet is increasingly used by providers as a source of information for eating disorder health issues. However, health information on the Internet remains unregulated and varies in quality, accuracy and readability. Objective: the objective of this study was to determine both general and information quality of eating disorder websites, including obesity websites. Methods: three key terms (obesity, anorexia and bulimia) were entered into the Google (R) search engine. Websites were assessed using two tests (HonCode (R) certification and Bermudez-Tamayo etal. test) to analyze overall quality, and a third test (DISCERN test) to analyze specifically information quality. Results: there were no significant differences regarding overall quality among the different pathologies studied (p=0.197), although anorexia websites tended to obtain lower quality scores. Furthermore, all evaluated websites showed significant deficiencies regarding information quality (p=0.032). Nevertheless, obesity websites showed a significant higher information quality than anorexia websites. Discussion and conclusion: the overall quality of eating disorders websites is moderate, but the information quality that they contain is fairly poor. Remarkably, anorexia nervosa websites showed both the lower information and general quality, while bulimia websites showed a higher general quality and obesity websites presented the most reliable information.