What tweets say about our health

Density of fast food restaurants by neighbourhood did predict how many mentions of fast food people in the neighbourhood made.

Twitter may not tell us what people are eating and doing, but it provides a sense of what people are saying

Thomson Reuters Posted: Oct 18, 2016 3:40 PM EDT | Last Updated: October 18, 2016

About 20 per cent of tweets were classified as happy in a new study. (Chesnot/Getty)

Tapping into the Twitter stream couldhelp researchers understand how healthy people's lifestyles areand how to target improved public health, according to a recentstudy.

Using geotagged tweets, researchers at the Universities ofUtah and Washington were able to build a map of the U.S. byneighbourhood, with indicators of how happy and active people inthat neighbourhood are and what their diets are like.

"Overall I think the patterns make sense, more fast foodrestaurants in the area are correlated with more fast foodmentions, but I was surprised that coffee was so highly ranked,"said lead author Quynh C. Nguyen of the University of UtahCollege of Health in Salt Lake City.

The researchers collected 1 per cent of randomly selectedtweets that were tagged with a geographic location between April2015 and March 2016. That yielded 80 million tweets from 603,000users in the contiguous U.S.

They then built several versions of a computer program,known as a machine learning algorithm, to sort the tweets byindicators of happiness, activity and diet. The results werechecked by humans to make sure tweets weren't misunderstood bythe machine for instance, in one case, the algorithmidentified tweets about basketball player Stephen Curry as foodtweets, before researchers corrected it.

The study team next mapped their sorted tweets to 2010census tracts and ZIP code areas.

About 20 per cent of tweets were classified as happy. Peopletend to only use a few words to talk about food or activity, sothe researchers only used 25 search terms.

Proximity to fitness centres or parks only modestlypredicted mentions of physical activity, but density of fastfood restaurants by neighbourhood did predict how many mentionsof fast food people in the neighbourhood made.

At the state level, more positive mentions of physicalactivity and healthy foods, as well as happiness, wereassociated with lower all-cause mortality and the prevalence ofchronic conditions like obesity and diabetes, according to thereport in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Public Healthand Surveillance.

"Right now we're correlating it with county-level andstate-level health outcomes," which will hopefully be helpfulfor health researchers in the future, Nguyen told ReutersHealth.

"We don't think the data can be taken as 100 percent a fooddiary; what we can see is what people are willing to share," shesaid. People are very willing to share about coffee, inparticular, which may be due to its "social capital," she noted.

"There's a certain image-crafting associated with beingonline," Nguyen said.

Twitter users also are not a perfect sample of people in theU.S., she said.

"It's important for researchers to utilize meaningful datato understand the underlying conditions that shape the health ofcommunities and individuals and to identify inequities in healththat we can do something about," Jennifer L. Black of theFaculty of Land and Food Systems at The University of BritishColumbia in Vancouver said by email.

"Because twitter and social media are so new as sources ofdata and sources of health information, I don't think we yetknow what the full potential is for tweets to shape healthbehaviors," said Black, who was not part of the new study.

Twitter may not tell us what people are eating and doing,but it provides a sense of what people are saying and writing,Black told Reuters Health.

"Twitter and social media may be able to tell us somethingabout peoples' experiences living in neighbourhoods with barriersto accessing healthy/fresh food," Black added. "In the comingyears it will be important for researchers as well as studentsand emerging food and nutrition professionals to gain insightabout how people use social media."

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External Links

http://publichealth.jmir.org/2016/2/e158/

What tweets say about our health

Twitter may not tell us what people are eating and doing, but it provides a sense of what people are saying

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