Diet during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of Twitter data

Mark A Hernandez; Shagun Modi; Kanisha Mittal; Pallavi Dwivedi; Quynh C Nguyen; Nina L Cesare; Elaine O Nsoesie

doi:10.1016/j.patter.2022.100547

Diet during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of Twitter data

Patterns (N Y). 2022 Aug 12;3(8):100547. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100547. Epub 2022 Jun 15.

Authors

Mark A Hernandez^{1

2}, Shagun Modi¹, Kanisha Mittal¹, Pallavi Dwivedi³, Quynh C Nguyen³, Nina L Cesare¹, Elaine O Nsoesie¹

Affiliations

¹ Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02118, USA.
² Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, MA 02421, USA.
³ Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20740, USA.

Abstract

In this study, we measured the association between county characteristics and changes in healthy-food, fast-food, and alcohol tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Our analytic dataset consisted of 1,282,316 geotagged tweets that referenced food consumption posted before (63.2%) and during (36.8%) the pandemic and included all US states. We found the share of healthy-food tweets increased by 20.5% during the pandemic compared with pre-pandemic, while fast-food and alcohol tweets decreased by 9.4% and 11.4%, respectively. We also observed that time spent at home and more grocery stores per capita were associated with increased odds of healthy-food tweets and decreased odds of fast-food tweets. More liquor stores per capita was associated with increased odds of alcohol tweets. Our results highlight the potential impact of the pandemic on nutrition and alcohol consumption and the association between the built environment and health behaviors.

Keywords: COVID-19; Twitter analysis; alcohol use; behavior changes; built environment; diet.

Abstract

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