Unveiling the Cultural Dimensions of Health Promotion in Italy: An AI-Driven Analysis of Healthy Lifestyle Interventions

Health promotion is widely recognized as a cornerstone for building healthier, more equitable, and sustainable societies (WHO, 1986; 2021). Its effectiveness lies not only in addressing individual behaviors but also in tackling the broader social, environmental, and economic determinants of health. By empowering individuals and communities with tools, skills, and resources, health promotion transforms passive recipients of medical advice into active participants in shaping personal wellbeing and collective resilience. Such an approach requires a holistic vision that is simultaneously clinical, social, and political, engaging citizens, institutions, industries, and the third sector in a shared responsibility for public health. Within this perspective, the adoption of healthy lifestyles, balanced nutrition, regular physical activity, reduced tobacco and alcohol consumption, and the prevention of sedentary habits and obesity, represents a crucial strategy for improving both individual and collective wellbeing. These behavioral determinants are central to global initiatives aimed at preventing chronic non-communicable diseases (WHO, 2013; United Nations, 2015), which remain the leading causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide, with long-term repercussions for health systems, economies, and societies at large (OECD, 2024). Yet, promoting these lifestyle changes is not only a medical challenge but also a cultural one: it requires messages that resonate with local symbolic universes and are perceived as both legitimate and meaningful by the populations they address. In recent years, advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) have opened new opportunities for rethinking health promotion. By analyzing large and complex corpora of data, these tools can uncover the symbolic and cultural dimensions embedded in public discourse and institutional practices, thereby providing deeper insight into the representations that shape health-related behaviors. This computational turn is not limited to efficiency: it allows for a more nuanced understanding of the cultural codes through which health, risk, and prevention are communicated and legitimized. In Italy, NLP can be fruitfully applied to projects funded by the Ministry of Health through the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CCM). Since 2004, the CCM has coordinated initiatives aimed at preventing behavioral risk factors and fostering healthy lifestyles, building a valuable database of project protocols. These protocols reflect the epistemological, cultural, and methodological paradigms of Italian public health, and therefore constitute a significant site for socio-cultural analysis. This chapter explores how NLP, specifically through Emotional Text Mining (ETM - Greco, 2016; Greco & Polli, 2020; Greco, La Rocca & Boccia Artieri, 2024), can be used to analyze these institutional intervention projects. ETM enables a qualitative–quantitative investigation of project protocols, reconstructing the symbolic universes underlying health promotion initiatives by examining both semantic and semiotic dimensions of discourse. In line with a socio-constructivist perspective, the study aims to show how symbolic–cultural categories and collective representations shape the rationale, design, and implementation of health promotion interventions.