The Latest Tool for Tracking Obesity? Facebook Likes

Obesity is a big problem that needs big solutions, and Facebook may be coming to the rescue.

In a way that’s never been possible before, people can record their interests, habits and daily activities that at first blush might seem to have only trivial meaning. But such data can be accessed by almost anyone (depending on privacy settings, of course), and that includes researchers. Scientists are turning to Facebook as a way to track how obesity trends, for example, correlate with geographically-specific trends in diet and exercise, and hope that such information can lead to more targeted ways of reversing the obesity epidemic.

The researchers, from Boston Children's Hospital, aggregated data on Facebook users’ interests and discovered that the higher percentage of people with interests that related to healthy and active lifestyles in a given area, the lower was that region's obesity rate. The opposite was true for areas with a large percentage of people with Facebook interests that related to television, for example.

To come up with the link, the scientists studied what national Facebook users posted on their timelines, what they "liked," and what they shared with their friends to come up with nation-wide associations.They also looked specifically at users within New York City and found similar trends at the neighborhood level, documenting that communities with more residents expressing interest in healthy lifestyle behaviors and products showed lower obesity rates than those where residents tended to show more interest in television shows.

Nationwide, obesity rates were 12% lower in areas where the highest percentage of Facebook users had exercise-related interests. In New York City, Coney Island, which had the highest percentage of users with activity-related interests had a 7.2% lower obesity rate than Southwest Queens, which had the lowest percentage of Facebook users with active interests. The power of the strategy, the scientists said, lay in the social media's ability to focus on both national as well as local trends.

"Definitely in public health [Facebook] is a great source for identifying where we should target public health interventions," says Rumi Chunara, an instructor at Boston Children's Hosptial and Harvard Medical Center and author of the study, which was published in the journal, PLOS ONE. "At the same time, because this is a real time source, we can also evaluate the status of other interventions."

Such assessments may be social media's most important contribution to fighting the obesity epidemic, says experts, since many of the current strategies to reverse the tide aren't working. "In order to combat obesity, we have to look beyond what we have been doing because it really hasn't worked, which is the traditional diet and exercise," says Dr. Jennifer Li, a professor of pediatrics and division chief of pediatric cardiology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.. "One way of reaching people is through social media since most people are connected through Facebook and Twitter and various social media. Li lead an American Heart Association study on using social media to fight childhood obesity.