Page 61 - Today's Dietitian (February 2020)

neighborhoods including terms such as
Starbucks, coffee, and vegan vs terms
such as pizza, tacos, and bacon in less
affluent neighborhoods. Net health-
fulness scores were best explained by
affluence, fast food density, and the
number of tweets, with less affluent
areas discussing less healthful foods.
Next, they looked for correlations
between Twitter content and neighbor-
hood demographics, finding that neigh-
borhoods with a higher percentage of
African American residents had more
positive sentiment about food, both
healthful and unhealthful. Vydiswaran
says, “We hypothesize that one possible
reason behind this is that the enjoyment
of food is a part of the culture.”
They also found that more affluent
areas had less positive sentiment about
food than other topics, with less affluent
areas having more positive food sentiment.
Social Media Could Be Used to Study lation in food-related tweeting and
Finally, they looked at the corre-
Health Behaviors Among Groups mortality rates from the top five obe-
sity-related causes of death: diabetes,
heart failure, kidney failure, stroke, and
Whether it be arguments about the whether there were differences between heart disease.
merits of pumpkin spice or who makes how groups of residents of a given region “In the multivariate regression analy-
the best chicken sandwich, food is an discussed food. sis, accounting for other neighborhood
ever-popular subject on social media. Their analysis began by scoring dif- measures such as affluence and per-
Michigan Medicine researchers turned ferent food-related keywords, including centage African American, our Twitter-
to Twitter to see what this online culi- types of foods, modes of preparation, based food healthiness measure was
nary discussion reveals about the and popular restaurants based on their still significantly correlated with one
people behind the posts and whether healthfulness. Foods were defined on a obesity-linked condition, heart failure,”
the platform could serve as a real-time scale of very unhealthful to very healthful Vydiswaran says.
tool for assessing information valuable based on dietary attributes such as trans The authors note that tweets are
to public health researchers. fat and added sugar content. an imperfect measure of behavior (for
“We wondered whether Twitter-based Next, using Twitter’s API, an interface example, they don’t necessarily account
analysis could help us understand com- which allows software access to Twitter’s for the amount of food consumed) and
munities better,” says V.G. Vinod Vydis- data, the group gathered geo-tagged that Twitter users may not represent the
waran, PhD, an assistant professor in the tweets from more than 1,200 census total population of an area. However,
department of learning health sciences tracts around the Detroit area. With a more traditional surveys also suffer from
at the University of Michigan (U-M) data set of more than 800,000 food- bias and often are much harder to con-
Medical School and assistant profes- related tweets from over 62,000 unique duct than social media analysis.
sor of information at the U-M School of tweeters, the group conducted sentiment “We are proposing using social media
Information, who’s lead author on a new analysis, determining whether the con- as an additional source of input for poli-
paper in the Journal of the American tent of each tweet trended negative or cymakers to understand neighbors,” he
Medical Informatics Association. positive. They removed tweets belong- says. “Social determinants of health, such
Researchers used community-based ing to celebrity influencers or marketing as neighborhood walkability, mentions
surveys to gather demographic and tweets that might artificially affect the of food deserts, safety concerns—these
health-related behavior information that online conversation. kinds of references show up in tweets
might help explain health status and dis- “We found differences in the kinds and could act as additional input for
parities between groups. For Vydiswaran of foods people tweet about in neigh- researchers wanting to understand how
and an interdisciplinary group of U-M borhoods,” Vydiswaran says, with they affect health more generally.”
researchers, the focus was on food and the top keywords in more affluent SOURCE: MICHIGAN MEDICINE – UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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