H4. Texts on nutrition could be encompassed within what is known as “service journalism”, in the meaning defined by Diezhandino as information “that imposes the requirement of being useful in the recipient’s personal life” (1994: 94); meaning that the recommendations/solutions focus prevails in the texts.

H5. The professional nutritionist-dietician sector fundamentally provides the sources for matters relating to nutrition.

H6. Nutrition is an information field capable of eliciting readers’ comments.

3. Methodology

This analysis has considered contributions from agenda-setting theory. As McCombs and Evatt explained, “by focussing on certain aspects, at the expense of others, and by suggesting certain solutions or answers instead of others, the broadcasting media’s messages have rather more influence than the topics, they influence how people think about these topics” (1995: 22). In this respect, Carballo et al. indicate an evolution in agenda-setting theory that has widened its scope; consequently, they consider it to be a very effective theoretical framework to analyse media contents on the public (2018: 127).

To study the sample, it has been examined twice –quantitatively and qualitatively– based on proposals concerning content analysis by authors such as Krippendorff (1990) or Bardin (1996), who explains that “the quantitative approach is established by the frequency that certain parts of the message appear”, whilst “the non-quantitative approach resorts to non-frequency indicators that are likely to allow inference” (1996: 87).

Our case analysed the contents, authorship, sections, genres and headlines and the sources of texts on nutrition.

When establishing a classification of the sources, other research papers on food and the media were reviewed, such as Pinzón-Ríos, Ocampo-Villegas and Gutiérrez-Coba (2015), the aforementioned Aranceta study (2015), and papers used in the SAM (2008) and Elika (2015) reports on food safety in the media in Catalonia and the Basque Country, respectively.

Furthermore, Framing Theory, understanding this to be an analysis and research tool to understand how the media constructs its discourse by framing its contents, was not particularly useful. Framing is considered to be interpretive outlines that act as the main text organisers. According to Entman (1993) to frame is to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” (1993: 52).

Over the last few years, many studies have addressed nutrition and similar topics from framing theory. So, and to quote just a few, Van Hooft et al. (2017) analyse how child obesity is treated in the Swedish press looking at the conceptualisation of Entman’s framing in so far as it respects the problem definition and its possible solutions; Hossain, N. (2018) studies the other side of the coin and investigates how international media framed food riots between 2007 and 2012. Their conclusions note that frames such as treatment recommendation would depend, among other factors, on the location and the role played by the media’s country of origin within the world food system.