While convenience like quick dining hall meals and food delivery often wins on campus, researchers wanted to know if the recipes students scroll past every day actually make a difference.To find out, researchers Aurora Occa and Lauren Batey created their own social media-style content."So there are a lot of recipes that we can find online on social media. They are one of the most common form of messages that you can find there. But do they actually inspire people to cook and cook healthily?" Aurora Occa said.Occa, an associate professor of communication, and Batey, a Win Win program coordinator, designed recipes with busy students in mind. They focused on meals that are easy, affordable, and healthy."I wrote those recipes for this study and then in the study we presented them as both Instagram reels so those are the short videos and as carousels so a series of images we were kind of testing which format worked better," Lauren Batey said."I would say that it's very challenging to cook healthily when you are having a busy lifestyle. There are a lot of things that are, uh, fighting for your attention. So the idea was for us to prepare a recipe that could be easily done in dorms for our students, but it could also still be inviting and of course uh nutritious and healthy," Occa said.After seeing the content, the researchers say students did not just scroll past the posts. They acted."We discovered that 11.2% of our sample actually cooked the sub baked potato and 19.7% cooked um the small bites," Occa said.The researchers say the key is meeting students where they already are on social media and making healthy cooking feel doable."A single exposure to a well-designed message can move the needle and can make a difference and can inspire students to cook nutritious food as long as we focus on making our messages clear, visually engaging, and easy to understand," Batey said. ...read more read less