A Novel Approach to Characterize State-level Food Environment and Predict Obesity Rate Using Social Media Data: Correlational Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Community obesity outcomes can reflect the food environment to which the community belongs. Recent studies have suggested that the local food environment can be measured by the degree of food accessibility, and survey data are normally used to calculate food accessibility. However, compared with survey data, social media data are organic, continuously updated, and cheaper to collect.

Objective

The objective of our study was to use publicly available social media data to learn the relationship between food environment and obesity rates at the state level.

Methods

To characterize the caloric information of the local food environment, we used food categories from Yelp and collected caloric information from MyFitnessPal for each category based on their popular

SUBMITTER: Li C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9795398 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature