Seasonal characterization of diet discussions on Reddit

To monitor public opinions on diet, large survey data is commonly used though costly and time consuming. Social media has become a mainstream channel of communication and has drastically grown in popularity, connecting users to a ready stream of health information. While the literature has provided valuable information on the use of social media for health, a broader perspective informed by different types of social media platforms would be highly beneficial. Diet has been extensively explored on a few mainstream platforms, further informing public health research. However, diet conversations on Reddit have only been studied within a narrow scope, looking at specific sub‐communities. This study aims to characterize diet‐related posts and their seasonal patterns using a mixed method approach. We collected more than 500,000 posts with subsequent comments from Reddit over the course of a year. Our findings show that Reddit users across all sub‐communities primarily discussed health promotion, fitness plans, a healthy lifestyle, diet and fitness progress, food experiences, weight loss, as well as vegan and vegetarian diets. In addition, seasonal differences based on the weight of most topics, were found to be significant (p