An Investigation of Possible Relationships Among Burnout, Nutrition, and Nutrition/Food Literacy Regarding a Scoping Review of 2020–2025 Peer-Reviewed Publications

This scoping review represents the first of 2020–2025, peer-reviewed publications investigating the possible relationships among burnout, nutrition, and nutrition/food literacy during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. The main conceptual insight is that these relationships are addressed only incidentally in existing research. Searches on 9 January 2026 were of the keywords (burnout OR job stress) AND (nutrition OR diet OR eating pattern OR food intake) AND (nutrition literacy OR food labeling) AND (food literacy OR health literacy). An eight-database search produced 160 returns. The included reports from these searches were from Google Scholar alone (n = 6). The addition of four relevant reports from a previous search of “burnout AND nutrition AND (nutrition literacy OR food literacy)” increased the included studies to ten. Although 2020 was the lower date limit, publication of the results was between 2023 and 2025. The finding is that research conducted during this period reports co-occurring issues of burnout, nutrition, and nutrition/food literacy in specific populations. The primary discovery is that assessing the relationships among these terms was not the aim of the included studies. This lack of dedicated research on this topic presents an opportunity for burnout and nutrition researchers to investigate these relationships intentionally.