Digital Health Policy Synergy and Habitual Moderation in Promoting Youth Healthy Eating and Mental Wellbeing

This study aims to develop and empirically test an integrative multi-path structural model explaining how digital health promotion and public health policy support jointly influence healthy eating behavior and mental wellbeing among Indonesian youth. Using a cross-sectional survey of 500 individuals aged 15–30 years, the study applies Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine direct, indirect, and moderated relationships, complemented by mediation analysis, moderation testing of health habits, FIMIX-PLS segmentation, Importance–Performance Map Analysis (IPMA), and PLSpredict for out-of-sample prediction. The findings demonstrate that digital health promotion and public health policy support significantly strengthen key psychological determinants, namely attitude toward healthy food marketing, nutritional self-efficacy, and perceived social norms, which subsequently enhance healthy eating behavior and mental wellbeing. Healthy eating behavior emerges as a dominant predictor of mental wellbeing, while health habits significantly moderate the influence of perceived social norms on behavior, indicating that established routines amplify socially driven dietary choices. This study offers novel contributions by integrating digital health promotion and public health policy support within a single multi-path structural framework while explicitly incorporating habitual moderation and advanced predictive analytics, thereby extending existing health behavior models and providing evidence-based guidance for designing synergistic digital and policy interventions to promote sustainable healthy eating practices and mental wellbeing among youth in developing country contexts.