Tweets on "Twitter" reveal people's consumption of healthy food during the Corona epidemic

A new study led by researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health points to dietary changes people made during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

Large-scale closures and restaurant closures in 2020 drastically altered daily routines and changed how people access food and alcohol, but analysis of tweets during Covid 19 suggests that some people may have chosen to abandon the bread craze and follow healthy eating habits, depending on their neighboring environment.

The study compared tweets about healthy food, fast food and alcohol before and during the pandemic, and found that the share of tweets about healthy food increased by 20.5% during the pandemic, while the share of tweets about fast food and alcohol decreased by 9.4% and 11.4%, respectively.

The findings also pointed to associations between healthy behavior and proximity to grocery stores or liquor stores among those who were able to stay home more during Covid-19, people who spent more time at home and lived in neighborhoods with more groceries per capita, who also tweeted More about healthy foods and tweeting less about junk food and alcohol during the pandemic than they did before the pandemic. Notably, the researchers found that people who lived in areas with more liquor stores per capita were more likely to tweet about alcohol.

"Our findings provide insight into the impact of public health interventions on food and alcohol consumption during the pandemic, and reinforce the notion that when it comes to influencing healthy behaviors, an individual's built environment matters," said corresponding study author, data scientist and researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Mark Hernandez.

Hernandez and colleagues examined geotagged and public tweets in the United States that mentioned healthy food, fast food, and alcohol before the pandemic (May 2019 to January 2020) and during the pandemic (May 2020 to January 2021).

The researchers linked geotagged tweets to US counties to examine the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and changes in eating and drinking habits, and obtained data from Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports to understand where residents were able to spend more time at home.

This analysis of tweets provides a more accurate and realistic understanding of potential changes in food consumption during the Corona pandemic, and fills in the gaps from previous research that relied primarily on traditional survey data subject to biased self-reports, on the other hand, social media data provides an opportunity for natural monitoring of voluntary information about situations and public behavior.

Study co-author Nina Siza says: “Twitter provides a window into the daily attitudes and behaviors of people whose opinions surveys may struggle to capture, in the context of diet. What is desirable about food consumption on Twitter is more precisely food preferences and habits.”

The researchers say the findings highlight the need for policies that increase access to healthy food options, particularly in areas that lack grocery stores.

“Policies can help motivate new grocers to open and store fresh food at affordable prices, or focus on investing in local food economies and strengthening food access programs,” Hernandez says. Prepare and prepare healthy foods.

These observations from the digital world and the built environment in the real world are astounding, says Eileen Nswize, first author of the study and associate professor of global health at BUSPH.

“Our data support well-known associations between social determinants of health and health outcomes, and these findings also reinforce the need to shift the narrative around health behaviors from blaming individuals and societies to policies and structures that lead to poor health,” Nswezy says.