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CSCW
2016
ACM

Characterizing Dietary Choices, Nutrition, and Language in Food Deserts via Social Media

8 years 7 months ago
Characterizing Dietary Choices, Nutrition, and Language in Food Deserts via Social Media
Social media has emerged as a promising source of data for public health. This paper examines how these platforms can provide empirical quantitative evidence for understanding dietary choices and nutritional challenges in “food deserts” — Census tracts characterized by poor access to healthy and affordable food. We present a study of 3 million food related posts shared on Instagram, and observe that content from food deserts indicate consumption of food high in fat, cholesterol and sugar; a rate higher by 5-17% compared to non-food desert areas. Further, a topic model analysis reveals the ingestion language of food deserts to bear distinct attributes. Finally, we investigate to what extent Instagram ingestion language is able to infer whether a tract is a food desert. We find that a predictive model that uses ingestion topics, socioeconomic and food deprivation status attributes yields high accuracy (>80%) and improves over baseline methods by 614%. We discuss the role of so...
Munmun De Choudhury, Sanket S. Sharma, Emre Kicima
Added 01 Apr 2016
Updated 01 Apr 2016
Type Journal
Year 2016
Where CSCW
Authors Munmun De Choudhury, Sanket S. Sharma, Emre Kiciman
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