Study: social media sites can help predict, track and map obesity rates

Which activities Facebook users like could help predict, track and map obesity rates of where they reside, according to a research study published April 24 in PLOS ONE.

Rumi Chunara, PhD, and John Brownstein, PhD, of the Boston Children’s Hospital’s informatics program, and colleagues found that Facebook users with interests suggesting a healthy and active lifestyle tended to live in cities, towns or neighborhoods with lower obesity rates. Conversely, users with television-related interests lived in areas with higher rates of obesity.  

In the study, Chunara, Brownstein and their team obtained aggregated Facebook user interest data from individuals nationally and just within New York City. They compared the percentages of users liking healthy activities or television with data from two telephone-based health surveys—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System-Selected Metropolitan/Micropolitan Area Risk Trends and New York City's EpiQuery Community Health Survey—that record geotagged data on body mass index.

Researchers then found that the comparison revealed close geographic relationships between Facebook interests and obesity rates.

“The online social network medium can also be used to understand the psychosocial interactions that could influence health outcomes, such as feelings of acceptability, behavior of friends and contacts or knowledge of services and support,” the study found. The large user base of social networks can allow researchers to study a distinct population at a variety of levels. It also helps facilitate research that often is costly due to difficulties in gathering adequate sample sizes and the slow pace of data analysis and reporting using traditional reporting and surveillance systems, according to the study.

"The tight correlation between Facebook users' interests and obesity data suggest that this kind of social network analysis could help generate real-time estimates of obesity levels in an area, help target public health campaigns that would promote healthy behavior change, and assess the success of those campaigns," said Brownstein in an announcement on the findings.

“Obesity is one of many significant health outcomes worldwide and the relationship between the online social environment and health outcomes should be evaluated further for other global health issues,” Chunara, Brownstein et al wrote.