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Food

19th Oct 2016

These are the 10 most talked about foods on the internet

Megan Roantree

Only one ‘healthy’ item made the list.

Once upon a time, we made food for the sole purpose of eating it, but now thanks to the influx of social media, we use it to make our online lives look good.

Since the invention of Instagram, people will spend hours making food look good, and spend almost as long getting the perfect image of it, just to shared it with a nice filter on Instagram.

While some of us might not understand this obsession, there is no denying it.

In an effort to understand some sort of pattern in our eating and online habits researchers from the University of Utah conducted a massive study.

They assessed around 80 million geotagged tweets sent between mid-2014 and mid-2015. They then sorted through them to find the 4 million which had mentioned food or drink.

They found a pattern in that messages from poor areas were more likely to discuss unhealthy food.

Lead researcher Quynh Nguyen said: ‘Our data could be telling us that certain neighborhoods have fewer resources to support healthy diets.’

Only one healthy food option emerged in the 10 most popular talked about food and drinks.

Unsurprisingly coffee came out on top (we blame Starbucks for spelling everyone’s name wrong) closely followed by beer.

Pizza was the most popular food on the list coming in at number 3. Of all 10 items, chicken is the only one on the list that could really be considered healthy and even that depends on how it’s prepared and cooked.

The full list is below.

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

Topics:

food,study