Linking Obesity and Tweets

Obesity has been a public health problem in the United States. The online social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ give users quick and easy way to engage in conversation about issues, problems, and concerns of their daily lives. In this exploratory research, our goal is to determine if the obesity conversation among Twitter users from fattest places is different than that among people from thinnest places. Our hypothesis is that the users in thinnest places would engage more, both in quantity and quality, in Twitter conversation about preventing obesity and promoting health than that of the users in fattest places. We conducted a comparative study of obesity conversations on Twitter by location of top ten fattest and thinnest cities as well as top ten fattest and thinnest states in the United States. Our results show that users in fattest cities and states participate significantly less in conversation covering the topics on and around obesity than that of thinnest cities and states.