Investigating the Role of Nutrition in Enhancing Immunity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Twitter Text-Mining Analysis

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the spotlight the critical role played by a balanced and healthy diet in bolstering the human immune system. There is burgeoning interest in nutrition-related information on social media platforms like Twitter. There is a critical need to assess and understand public opinion, attitudes, and sentiments toward nutrition-related information shared on Twitter.

Objective: This study uses text mining to analyze nutrition-related messages on Twitter to identify and analyze how the general public perceives various food groups and diets for improving immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Methods: We gathered 71,178 nutrition-related tweets that were posted between January 01, 2020, and September 30, 2020. The Correlated Explanation text mining algorithm was used to identify frequently discussed topics that users mentioned as contributing to immunity building against SARS-CoV-2. We assessed the relative importance of these topics and performed a sentiment analysis. We also qualitatively examined the tweets to gain a closer understanding of nutrition-related topics and food groups.

Results: Text-mining yielded 10 topics that users discussed frequently on Twitter, viz proteins, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy-related, spices and herbs, fluids, supplements, avoidable foods, and specialty diets. Supplements were the most frequently discussed topic (23,913/71,178, 33.6%) with a higher proportion (20,935/23,913, 87.75%) exhibiting a positive sentiment with a score of 0.41. Consuming fluids (17,685/71,178, 24.85%) and fruits (14,807/71,178, 20.80%) were the second and third most frequent topics with favorable, positive sentiments. Spices and herbs (8719/71,178, 12.25%) and avoidable foods (8619/71,178, 12.11%) were also frequently discussed. Negative sentiments were observed for a higher proportion of avoidable foods (7627/8619, 84.31%) with a sentiment score of -0.39.

Conclusions: This study identified 10 important food groups and associated sentiments that users discussed as a means to improve immunity. Our findings can help dieticians and nutritionists to frame appropriate interventions and diet programs.

Keywords: COVID-19; Twitter; assessment; diet; dieticians; food; food groups; immune system; immunity; immunity building; nutrition; nutrition discourse; nutritionists; social media; text mining; tweets.

Figure 1

Study workflow.

Figure 2

Trends in number of nutrition-related tweets (January-September, 2020).