THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON A CARDIOVASCULAR FOCUSED DIET

Therapeutic Area

Nutrition/Exercise

Background

Social media has become a powerful, influential platform that is saturated in health-related information. Heart healthy diets have recently gained interest prompting a wave of content creation and engagement. This increased visibility raises important questions about the nature, sentiment, and trends that may influence public perception and dietary behaviors.

Methods

We conducted a sentiment analysis and content review using a pretrained BERT-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) model to classify social media posts based on diet keywords to classify interests. We analyzed over 450 social media posts from websites including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram that included “heart-healthy foods”, “low sodium diet”, “DASH diet”, and “Mediterranean diet” using NLP posts were then classified unto positive, neutral or negative with analysis of amount of engagement of each post. This was then compared to search-engine trends of diet related searches by analyzing Google data between 2018-2023.

Results

An analysis of TikTok posts, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts revealed positive ratings of 85%, 70%, and 80% respectively. Unfortunately, health advice by influencers significantly contradicted evidence-based practice with inaccurate data ranging from “miracle foods” (e.g., blood pressure lowering celery), to oversimplified diet recommendations (“eat butter for heart health” in ketogenic circles), to promoting unregulated dietary supplements and detox programs. Only 36% of nutrition related posts on TikTok and Instagram were found to be fully accurate. The Mediterranean diet has had consistently strong interest, accounting for 33.9% of Google searches. Interest in fad diets such as keto and intermittent fasting peaked during the pandemic (2020-2021) but later declined, although there are regular yearly spikes in diet-searches in January and February.

Conclusions

By comprehensively analyzing volume, content, and sentiment towards heart-healthy diets on these different platforms, we can gain insights into the role they are playing in shaping dietary habits, highlighting potential haps and opportunities to improve health education and preventative medicine. Given the influence of social media on nutrition information, healthcare professionals have an obligation to use evidence-based practices to closely monitor, guide, and engage patients in discussions regarding the best practices for heart-healthy diets.