The association between digital competence and healthy diet of Chinese rural residents: the mediating role of food safety perception.

It has been confirmed that digital competence and food safety issues are significantly associated with people's healthy dietary, while the intrinsic association mechanism remains limited. This study firstly examined the mediation association of food safety perception between digital competence and healthy diet in rural China. The observational data analyzed in this study was from 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS). Multiple linear regression was employed to analyze the association between digital competence, food safety perception and healthy diet, and bootstrap mediation analysis method was adopted to check the mediation association in the relationship. The results showed that higher digital competence (β = 0.076, P < 0.001) was associated with healthier diet, and food safety perception partially mediated the association between digital competence and healthy diet. The mediating proportion of food safety perception in the total effect accounted for 22.37%. Heterogeneity analysis disclosed that the mediating association of food safety perception was primarily concentrated among rural residents in central and western regions and was of greater magnitude among older adults than younger rural residents (28.57% vs 14.50%). The findings in this study highlight the likelihood of digital competence and food safety perception in mitigating the urban-rural well-being disparities and reveal a new transform of perception to practice in promoting healthy diet in the digital age.