The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media [arXiv] [PLoS ONE]

Sharon E. Alajajian, Jake R. Williams, Andrew J. Reagan, Stephen C. Alajajian, Morgan R. Frank, Lewis Mitchell, Jacob Lahne, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds

Data

The lists of food and activity phrases, with the associated caloric values, are provided here. Calories are given per 100 grams of food, and calories expended per hour of exercise for an adult weighing 80.7 kg (the average weight of a North American adult).

We also provide a list of the IDs of all Tweets used in the study. We used all available geotagged tweets from 2011 and 2012 (around 50 million) from a bounding box of the contiguous US, using Twitter’s garden hose sample (which is a sample of approximately 10% of all tweets, including those that are not geotagged) and the geotag feature to determine from which of the 48 continental states and the District of Columbia each tweet came. From this sample, we counted the total number of times each food and physical activity phrase in our database was tweeted about in each of the 48 continental states and the District of Columbia.