Last time you tweeted about your epic #brunch, you may have unknowingly participated in a new study that analyzed food-related tweets and compared them to various location-based factors, such as diabetes rate, overweight rate, and political leaning.
For the paper, researchers from the University of Arizona at Tuscon collected 3.5 million tweets with food-related hashtags, all of which were posted from October 2013 to May 2014. Whenever they could, researchers noted the user's self-reported location, time zone, and geotagging information. Interestingly, they found that the tweets could successfully predict many factors about the tweeters, including their home states and towns, the overweight rate there, the diabetes rate there, and the political tendency there. For example, users who tweeted food-related tweets with the word "I" tended to be from states with a high rate of overweight people, while people who tended to post using the words "you" or "we" were more likely to be from states where the average weight is below the median.
If you ask us, though, the most fun findings are related to what types of food-related words people tend to tweet in each state. While these aren't necessarily the most common food-related hashtags (researchers eliminated words that occurred frequently across the country and also prioritized words that were highly representative of the location when creating this list), they are pretty interesting:
Another fun fact: People in blue states were more likely to use hashtags like #vegan and #brunch (while Republican states were more likely to tweet about work and home in their food-related tweets). "In the future, we would like to use our system to predict characteristics of individuals—e.g., propensity for diabetes—using the individuals’ food information," write the study authors.
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