What the top 10 most tweeted foods say about our health

#Coffee rules. Coffee outranked beer and pizza in a list of the top 10 most tweeted foods compiled by researchers at the University Of Utah College Of Health.

Chicken was the only healthy food to appear in the top 10, coming in at number seven. While the only fast food brand to feature was Starbucks.

Wine, Bbq, ice cream and tacos also made the list.

This US study, published online in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, was about more than highlighting the most popular foods, however.

What the researchers really wanted to find out was whether the foods we tweet about have anything to say about our overall health.

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To do so, they surveyed 80 million geotagged tweets posted from mid-2014 to mid-2015 in the continental US. Of these, four million were about food.

These were sorted into tweets about healthy foods (lean meats, fruits, vegetables or nuts) and those related to fast food restaurants.

After cross referencing the food tweets with census data and health surveys, it was found that communities that tweeted more positive feelings about healthy foods were more likely to be healthy overall.

In areas where fast food restaurants abounded, people were more likely to tweet about them. Healthy foods were mentioned less often by the residents of poor neighbourhoods and regions with big households.

Professor Quynh Nguyen, lead author of the study, said it was too early to draw conclusions about what this could mean, however, because tweets are biased.

"Twitter users represent a fraction of the population and skew towards 18 to 49 year olds.

"Plus, people are more likely to broadcast certain foods over others. You might be more inclined to tell your friends about a celebratory cupcake than a stack of celery sticks," she said.

And after all, no study is infallible. About 15% of the tweets confused the computer sorting them, which listed basketball player Stephen Curry under food tweets.

Top 10 tweeted foods:

1) Coffee 
2) Beer 
3) Pizza 
4) Starbucks 
5) IPA (beer) 
6) Wine 
7) Chicken 
8) Bbq 
9) Ice cream 
10) Taco/tacos