Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 16, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 16, 2023 - May 11, 2023
Date Accepted: May 9, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Investigating the Role of Nutrition in Enhancing Immunity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Twitter Text-Mining Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to spotlight the critical role played by balanced and healthy diet in bolstering the human immune system. There is burgeoning interest in nutrition-related information on social media platforms like twitter. There is a critical need to assess and understand public opinion, attitudes and sentiments towards nutrition-related information shared on twitter.
Objective:
This study uses text mining to analyze nutrition-related messages on Twitter to identify and analyze how the general public perceives various food groups and diets for improving immunity to the SARS-CoV2 virus.
Methods:
We gathered 71,178 nutrition-related tweets that were posted between January, 01 2020 and September 30, 2020. Correlated Explanation (CorEx) text mining algorithm was used to identify frequently-discussed topics that users mentioned as contributing to immunity building against coronavirus. We assessed the relative importance of these topics and performed a sentiment analysis. We also qualitatively examined the tweets to gain a closer understanding of nutrition-related topics and food groups.
Results:
Text-mining yielded ten topics that users discussed frequently on twitter viz. proteins, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy-related, spices and herbs, fluids, supplements, avoidable foods and specialty diets. Supplements was the most-frequently discussed topic (33.6%) with a higher proportion (87.75%) exhibiting a positive sentiment with a score of 0.41. Consuming fluids (24.85%) and fruits (20.80%) were the second and third most frequent topics with favorable, positive sentiments. Spices and herbs (12.25%) and avoidable foods (12.11%) were also frequently discussed. Negative sentiments were observed for a higher proportion of avoidable foods (84.31%) with a sentiment score of -0.39.
Conclusions:
This study identified ten important food groups and associated sentiments that users discussed as a means to improving immunity. Our findings can help healthcare professionals, dieticians and nutritionists to frame appropriate interventions and diet programs
Citation
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Copyright
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