Digital storytelling boosts knowledge and behavioral expectation to reduce dietary sodium: a randomized controlled trial

Excessive sodium intake is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease and mortality. Reducing daily sodium consumption to below 2 g (~5 g of salt) effectively lowers cardiovascular mortality rates. The growing reach of social media and short-form video content offers new opportunities to disseminate health information through scalable, digital interventions such as short, animated storytelling (SAS) videos. We evaluated the effect of a sodium-focused SAS video on knowledge and behavioral expectation to reduce dietary sodium, as well as measuring voluntary post-trial engagement. In this four-arm, parallel, randomized controlled trial, 8616 U.S. adults were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (1) SAS video + survey, (2) survey only, (3) attention-placebo video + survey, or (4) no exposure. Participants completed follow-up surveys 2 weeks later. Single exposure to the SAS video significantly improved knowledge, both immediately and 2 weeks later, while increasing behavioral expectation to reduce sodium intake at both timepoints. Post-trial voluntary engagement with the intervention was high. These findings highlight the potential of scalable, digital storytelling interventions to enhance dietary knowledge and motivation for behavior change. Identifying demographic groups most likely to engage with SAS content may inform the design of targeted strategies to reduce cardiovascular risk. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05735457, 02/21/23.