TUCSON – To investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media, University of Arizona researchers used Twitter hashtags to find out the most talked-about foods in each state.

Using more than 3 million food-related posts from Twitter, researchers sought to understand if information about individuals’ diets, reflected in the language they use to describe their food, can reveal information about a community. “This information can be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from improving public health to better targeted marketing,” notes the report.

(Source: University of Arizona)

Researchers suggest that the study “demonstrates that food and food discussion are a major part of who we are,” noting that the system for collecting food-related tweets could predict population characteristics such as obesity, diabetes rates, political preferences and geographic locations of the individuals who are tweeting.

“Our analysis indicates that the language of food alone is extremely powerful,” write the authors, adding that their research also provides “big-data-driven insights into connections between the language of food and the investigated population characteristics.”