Tweeting and Eating: The Effect of Links and Likes on Food-Hypersensitive Consumers' Perceptions of Tweets

Social Media Influences on Dietary Awareness in Children

BACKGROUND

Social media platforms have become increasingly influential channels for discussing various aspects of children's health, including dietary habits and food choices. This research explores the impact of social media on childhood dietary habits regarding the foods children consume by analyzing published findings about online videos and other social media platforms.

METHODS

From a pool of 9646 articles available on Google Scholar, Science Direct, Web of Science, and ProQuest, 25 were selected for inclusion in this systematic literature review after meeting the qualifying criteria. The screened papers contained clinical studies, cross-sectional studies, and editorials published in English.

RESULTS

A review of these articles revealed that individuals' communication with friends via social media significantly enhanced their comprehension of conversations related to weight management. The results of this research inform efforts to combat poor diets and promote overall well-being among children at an earlier stage when personal interactions are likely limited. To promote the healthy growth of children, it is essential that the videos they engage with offer them appropriate guidance on maintaining a nutritious diet. Ultimately, this research provides insights into how social media creates environments conducive to the well-being of children.

CONCLUSIONS

As a result, social media can serve as a valuable resource to help mitigate the prevalence of obesity in this vulnerable population.

Body dissatisfaction and beyond: Investigating attitudes towards calorie labels on UK food menus

In 2022 the British government made calorie labels on menus a legal requirement to encourage healthier food choices while dining out. Yet, little research has explored perceptions of calorie labels on menus in the United Kingdom or tested whether there may be groups of people vulnerable to potential negative effects of calorie labels, such as those with body dissatisfaction. This between-subjects, convergent mixed-methods study addressed these enquiries. Participants were 562 adults who completed an online survey where hypothetical food orders were made from a menu. The study found that participants who viewed a menu with calorie labels ordered fewer calories. Quantitative results did not find that participants with higher levels of body dissatisfaction were at significantly greater odds of using calorie labels to order fewer calories. However, our qualitative (thematic) analysis revealed that experiences of calorie labels could be shaped by body image concerns. Themes further drew on how calorie labels were empowering, but there were also concerns about their oversimplicity. Findings are discussed in relation to implications for future calorie labelling policies. Given the inconsistent findings amongst the limited amount of literature investigating the role of body dissatisfaction in how calorie labels are used, future research is crucial. In the meantime, as a cautionary measure, clinicians involved in supporting individuals with body or food-related concerns should be aware of the challenges their clients may experience in facing calorie labels on menus when dining out.

Arranging the fruit basket: A computational approach towards a better understanding of adolescents' diet-related social media communications

This study investigated the contents and linguistic styles that adolescents use in their dietary communications on social media. The main aim of the study was to describe adolescents' social media communication practices with regards to diet, in order to better understand dietary social influences and how to effectively intervene in them. The current study made use of an online communication dataset (N = 72,384 messages) of adolescents in primary and secondary school (N = 1038, 9-16 y/o). We analyzed the message content using tailor-made diet- and health-related dictionaries and LDA topic modeling. The linguistic style of the messages was investigated by assessing the sentiment and underlying psychological dimensions. Further, we used multivariate linear regressions to test how each message dimension was related to message liking, which was considered as an indicator of a message's influence potential regarding peers' dietary behaviors. The results confirmed that adolescents show a preference to discuss neutral-to-unhealthy dietary items most often. No association emerged between message content (i.e., message healthiness and topics) and the number of likes that a message received, while messages with more positive sentiment and higher subjectivity received slightly more likes. Also, our findings confirm that visual dietary content is more often liked than textual descriptions alone. The findings indicate that the content and the healthiness of a message does not explain its popularity among adolescents. Rather, the way how diet-related content is formulated (i.e., in a positive and subjective tone) emerged as a more important predictor for message liking.

Twitter Trends for Celiac Disease and the Gluten-Free Diet: Cross-sectional Descriptive Analysis

Background

Few studies have systematically analyzed information regarding chronic medical conditions and available treatments on social media. Celiac disease (CD) is an exemplar of the need to investigate web-based educational sources. CD is an autoimmune condition wherein the ingestion of gluten causes intestinal damage and, if left untreated by a strict gluten-free diet (GFD), can result in significant nutritional deficiencies leading to cancer, bone disease, and death. Adherence to the GFD can be difficult owing to cost and negative stigma, including misinformation about what gluten is and who should avoid it. Given the significant impact that negative stigma and common misunderstandings have on the treatment of CD, this condition was chosen to systematically investigate the scope and nature of sources and information distributed through social media.

Objective

To address concerns related to educational social media sources, this study explored trends on the social media platform Twitter about CD and the GFD to identify primary influencers and the type of information disseminated by these influencers.

Methods

This cross-sectional study used data mining to collect tweets and users who used the hashtags #celiac and #glutenfree from an 8-month time frame. Tweets were then analyzed to describe who is disseminating information via this platform and the content, source, and frequency of such information.

Results

More content was posted for #glutenfree (1501.8 tweets per day) than for #celiac (69 tweets per day). A substantial proportion of the content was produced by a small percentage of contributors (ie, "Superuser"), who could be categorized as self-promotors (eg, bloggers, writers, authors; 13.9% of #glutenfree tweets and 22.7% of #celiac tweets), self-identified female family members (eg, mother; 4.3% of #glutenfree tweets and 8% of #celiac tweets), or commercial entities (eg, restaurants and bakeries). On the other hand, relatively few self-identified scientific, nonprofit, and medical provider users made substantial contributions on Twitter related to the GFD or CD (1% of #glutenfree tweets and 3.1% of #celiac tweets, respectively).

Conclusions

Most material on Twitter was provided by self-promoters, commercial entities, or self-identified female family members, which may not have been supported by current medical and scientific practices. Researchers and medical providers could potentially benefit from contributing more to this space to enhance the web-based resources for patients and families.

Understanding the effects of message cues on COVID-19 information sharing on Twitter

Analyzing and documenting human information behaviors in the context of global public health crises such as the COVID‐19 pandemic are critical to informing crisis management. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, this study investigates how three types of peripheral cues—content richness, emotional valence, and communication topic—are associated with COVID‐19 information sharing on Twitter. We used computational methods, combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling with psycholinguistic indicators obtained from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary to measure these concepts and built a research model to assess their effects on information sharing. Results showed that content richness was negatively associated with information sharing. Tweets with negative emotions received more user engagement, whereas tweets with positive emotions were less likely to be disseminated. Further, tweets mentioning advisories tended to receive more retweets than those mentioning support and news updates. More importantly, emotional valence moderated the relationship between communication topics and information sharing—tweets discussing news updates and support conveying positive sentiments led to more information sharing; tweets mentioning the impact of COVID‐19 with negative emotions triggered more sharing. Finally, theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed in the context of global public health communication.

Does exposure to socially endorsed food images on social media influence food intake?

Social norms can influence the consumption of high and low energy-dense (HED/LED) snack foods. Such norms could be communicated via social media, however, there is little experimental research investigating this possibility. This laboratory study aimed to investigate the acute effect of socially endorsed social media posts on participants' eating behaviour. Healthy women students (n = 169; mean age = 20.9; mean BMI = 23.3) were assigned to either a HED, LED or control condition, where they viewed three types of images (HED foods, LED foods and interior design as control), but only one type was socially endorsed (e.g. in the control condition, only interior design images were socially endorsed). Participants completed questionnaires and were also provided a snack buffet of grapes and cookies. One-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of condition on participants' relative consumption of grapes (percentage of grapes consumed out of total food intake), for both grams and calories consumed (both ps < .05). Follow-up t-tests revealed that participants consumed a larger proportion of grapes (grams and calories) in the LED condition vs HED condition (all ps < .05), and a larger proportion of calories from grapes in the LED compared to control condition (p < .05). These findings suggest that exposure to socially endorsed images of LED food on social media could nudge people to consume more of, and derive more calories from these foods in place of HED foods. Further research is required to examine the potential application of these findings.

Perceptions of Food Hypersensitivity Expertise on Social Media: Qualitative Study

Background

Seeking and sharing information are the primary uses of the internet and social media. It is therefore vital to understand the processes individuals go through when engaging with information on these diverse platforms, especially in areas such as health- and risk-related information. One important element of such engagement is evaluating and attributing expertise to others.

Objective

This study aimed to explore how meanings around expertise in relation to food allergy and intolerance (food hypersensitivity) were constructed by 2 groups of social media users: (1) those who use platforms for reasons relating to food hypersensitivity and (2) those seen as experts by this community.

Methods

Survey participants were asked open-ended questions to identify potential experts in food hypersensitivity issues on social media and to discuss their reasoning for their choices (n=143). Subsequently, 8 adult social media users with experience of managing food hypersensitivity and 5 participants designated as experts by those users took part in email interviews. Survey and interview data were analyzed thematically using Braun and Clarke’s approach.

Results

Judging expertise on social media is a complex and multifaceted process. Users might be judged as experts through their professional background or their experience living with food hypersensitivities. How users behave on social media and the traces of their Web-based activity can influence how others will see them. Such considerations are both measured and moderated through the social media community itself. Findings highlighted how social media often act as a supportive information tool following a diagnosis, but this also raised concerns regarding the scenario of patients not being able to access suitable vetted information.

Conclusions

This work has implications for understanding how users perceive expertise on social media in relation to a health concern and how information assessments are made during the management of risks. Findings provide practical insights to both medical and organizational stakeholders involved in the support of those living with life-changing conditions, such as food hypersensitivities.