Twitter Could Be Useful Tool In Tracking How And Why We Eat

There's a whole slew of reasons why we eat something. Convenience is a factor, for sure. Hunger, of course, is another. And then there's always the consideration of what's cheap. But now, researchers have shown that Twitter, of all things, can be a useful tool in helping us understand the relationship between eating behaviors and reasons for eating.

University of Arizona researchers asked 50 study participants, between ages 18 and 30, to tweet everything that they ate for three days, along with a hashtag to indicate the type of food they were eating and why they were eating it. (For instance: "Cheeseburger between classes at the Student Union #protein #convenience.")

By doing this, researchers were able to make a visual representation of all the foods the study participants were eating, in the context of why they were eating them. This "allowed us to really see that there are, in fact, relationships, and those relationships do seem to align with the ones in the literature, which shows that convenience and cost ^[1] are among the main motivators" for consuming food, study researcher Melanie Hingle, an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the university, said in a statement.

"It's good to raise awareness about your habits ^[2] since a lot of eating behavior is unconscious or really habitual," Hingle added. "You tend to get in your groove and not get out of it, so this kind of shakes that up and makes you think about what's influencing you. It can help you develop new habits or just become aware of the ones that are not doing you any good."

The study is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research ^[3] .

Our eating habits aren't the only things Twitter can shed some light on. Check out the slideshow below for more things the social media site can tell us about our health:

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How Much We Know And Care About CPR, AEDs And Cardiac Arrest

In two new studies, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have found that people are tweeting about cardiac arrest, CPR and AEDS (automated external defibrillators), and that the microblogging platform has the potential to spread more awareness and spur more discussion on the topics. The research was presented this month at the annual <a href="http://scientificsessions.org/" target="_hplink">Scientific Sessions</a> meeting of the American Heart Association.

In one of the studies, researchers sought to find out what exactly <a href="http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/124/21_MeetingAbstracts/A53?sid=6e736fad-18a8-4580-8b6d-225308e637e6" target="_hplink">people were asking about cardiac arrest and CPR </a>on Twitter. They analyzed 13,981 tweets and found that 21 percent of cardiac arrest-related questions had to do with symptoms, prognosis or risk factors of the condition, and 39 percent of the questions had to do with guidelines, certification and proper technique of CPR. Forty percent of the questions had to do with costs, safety and use of AEDs.

In the other study, researchers looked at 15,324 tweets that contained some sort of <a href="http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/124/21_MeetingAbstracts/A52?sid=6e736fad-18a8-4580-8b6d-225308e637e6" target="_hplink">information about cardiac arrest</a>. Among their findings: 14 percent of those tweets were a direct reference to a cardiac arrest, while 5 percent were personal stories of cardiac arrest.

Twenty-nine percent of the tweets had to do with using CPR or an AED and almost 60 percent of the tweets had to do with training or advocacy events for cardiac arrest, or news about a celebrity, athlete or young adult who had undergone cardiac arrest.

What We Think About The Flu

A study published earlier this year in the journal <em>PLoS Computational Biology</em> shows that Twitter could be used to track <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/15/twitter-flu-shot-vaccinations_n_1010899.html" target="_hplink">flu shot vaccination rates</a> and attitudes.

That research, conducted by Pennsylvania State researchers, involved analysis of 477,768 tweets between August 2009 and January 2010 that contained some sort of wordage about the H1N1 vaccine. The researcher was able to see what parts of the U.S. had the highest flu vaccination rates (based on the Twitter information), as well as what the general sentiments were toward the vaccine (New Englanders are most positive toward the vaccine, and are also the most likely to get vaccinated).

Researchers also found that people were most negative toward the flu vaccine when it was first introduced, but then the reaction grew increasingly positive the more time passed.

What's Ailing Us -- And What We've Got Wrong About Our Health

Recent research from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore shows that you can look on Twitter to get a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/08/twitter-health_n_893466.html#s305983&title=Chris_Tung" target="_hplink">general feel for what ills people are experiencing</a>. They found in their study of 1.5 million health-related tweets that people are tweeting most about depression, cancer, obesity, allergies, insomnia and pain.

Researchers also found that Twitter could be used to unearth some common health misconceptions we have.

For example, "we found that some people tweeted that they were <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14059745" target="_hplink">taking antibiotics for the flu</a>," Ph.D. student Michael J. Paul, one of the researchers for the project, told BBC News. "But antibiotics don't work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems."

How We're Feeling

Turns out, we're <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/29/twitter-mood-study_n_987569.html" target="_hplink">happiest early in the morning</a> and around midnight, according to a Twitter study conducted by Cornell University researchers.

Researchers looked at half a billion tweets from more than 2 million Twitter users over a two-year period, and found that Twitter users' <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/29/twitter-mood-study_n_987569.html" target="_hplink">moods tend to start happy</a> early in the day and then get more negative as the day wears on, but then peak again in happiness at midnight.

"Everybody we told about this has had the same reaction: 'That's obvious. People go to work, they get stressed -- of course their mood deteriorates,'" study researcher Michael Macy, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at Cornell, told HuffPost. "It turns out, that's not true."

Because researchers found that the "daily mood swing" unearthed by Twitter was also the case during the weekends, they suggest that the changes in emotions might be affected by our sleep and circadian rhythms, and not just a bad mood brought on by the workday.

What We Understand (And Misunderstand) About Antibiotics

What we <a href="http://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(10)00034-9/abstract" target="_hplink">think we know about antibiotics</a> is very easily spread through Twitter, according to a study published last year in <em>AJIC: American Journal of Infection Control</em>. However, the viral nature of Twitter has the ability to backfire if the antibiotic information isn't correct, researchers said.

The study, conducted by Columbia University and MixedInk researchers, looked at 52,153 <a href="http://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(10)00034-9/abstract" target="_hplink">tweets that mentioned antibiotics</a> that were posted between March 13, 2009 and July 31, 2009. Researchers used word combinations like "extra + antibiotic(s)" and "leftover + antibiotic(s)" to narrow down the tweets further.

They found that when it came to tweeting about antibiotics, people were most commonly talking about how many days they had left on an antibiotic regimen, or a desire that antibiotics help to kick an illness soon. The second most common topic was advice on antibiotics, and the third most common topic was side effects that come from taking antibiotics.

Out of all the tweets, 700 were spreading some sort of misunderstanding about antibiotics, researchers found. For example: the word combination of "flu + antibiotic(s)" yielded 345 tweets, which in turn reached a total of 172,571 Twitter followers.