Twitter is not only a venue for rants and raves, musings and thoughts, and of status updates of celebrities. It can be possibly a venue for researchers to find out about Twitter users' health by analyzing their tweets.
In a study published online in Journal of Medical Internet Research Public Health and Surveillance, researchers led by Quynh C. Nguyen from University of Utah detailed how they proceed in analysing the tweets. First, the team used geotagged tweets to mapped out places that has the highest indicator of healthy lifestyle. They took 1 percent of these tweets, which compromises of 80 million tweets from 603,000 users in the US, Fox News reports.
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After selecting tweets randomly, a machine with algorithm capabilities sorted out tweets that are food-related and that indicates happiness and health. Researchers, however, did fact-checkig the data as machines cannot distunguish the difference between "curry" as food to "Stephen Curry." It turns out that the most tweeted food-related word is "coffee" while the most tweeted activity is "walking/walked." What do these results suggest?
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The researchers found that those tweets that have fastfood or unhealthy food don't have nearby farm store or supermarket that has healthy options. Tweets that do not mention about exercise-related stuff such as walking have no venues to do such. Using tweets as basis might not be as reliable since it is biased but researchers said that these tweets will help understand on why a certain area is more inclined to healthy options compare to others.
Below are the top ten lists that are the results from the study, as reported by Science Daily.
The top 10 tweeted foods are (in order):
- coffee
- bear
- pizza
- Starbucks
- IPA (beer)
- wine
- chicken
- bbq
- ice cream
- taco/tacos
Top 10 physical tweeted activities
- walk/walking/walked
- dance/dancing
- running
- workout
- golf
- (swimming) pool
- hike/hiking
- yoga
- swim/swimming
- bowling