A new study by researchers at the University of Arizona have identified an interesting use for Twitter, the popular social networking site; keeping track of what people eat and why.
According to Alexis Blue of University Communications, the study led by Melanie Hingle, a UA Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences, set out to determine whether the popular social networking site could be used to capture, in real time, information about peoples’ dietary choices and what motivates them.
The study’s findings suggest that Twitter is an acceptable tool for collecting such information and could give people a better understanding of the relationship between what they eat and why.
The research, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, shows that the information could help health professionals as they work to develop the most effective health and weight-loss interventions for individuals.
“This helps us understand what is driving eating behavior, and that’s important from a healthy eating program standpoint,” said Hingle, a faculty member in the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “If I am going to develop a program to promote healthy eating to people, I want to know what motivates them to engage in their current eating behavior so I can tailor that program appropriately.”
According to Blue, the study stemmed from a special topics course Hingle taught at the UA on obesity prevention funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture Higher Education Challenge grant.
Hingle and her colleagues chose to look at the feasibility and acceptability of Twitter as a tool for recording dietary information because it is free, widely used and provides an easy way to record data in real time.
The study’s 50 participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 30 and were not students in Hingle’s class, were given study-specific Twitter accounts and asked to “tweet” everything they ate or drank in real time for three consecutive days. They were asked to choose from a list of 24 provided hashtags to categorize the types of food they were eating and their reason for eating it. They also were asked to include descriptive information or photos identifying where, when, why and with whom they were eating. A tweet might read, for example: “Cheeseburger between classes at the Student Union #protein #convenience.”
Frequently reported food categories included #grains, #dairy and #protein, while the most frequently cited reasons for eating were #social, #taste and #convenience.
From UofA News