Reddit's Appetite: Predicting User Engagement with Nutritional Content

The increased popularity of food communities on social media shapes the way people engage with food-related content. Due to the extensive consequences of such content on users' eating behavior, researchers have started studying the factors that drive user engagement with food in online platforms. However, while most studies focus on visual aspects of food content in social media, there exist only initial studies exploring the impact of nutritional content on user engagement. In this paper, we set out to close this gap and analyze food-related posts on Reddit, focusing on the association between the nutritional density of a meal and engagement levels, particularly the number of comments. Hence, we collect and empirically analyze almost 600,000 food-related posts and uncover differences in nutritional content between engaging and non-engaging posts. Moreover, we train a series of XGBoost models, and evaluate the importance of nutritional density while predicting whether users will comment on a post or whether a post will substantially resonate with the community. We find that nutritional features improve the baseline model's accuracy by 4%, with a positive contribution of calorie density towards prediction of engagement, suggesting that higher nutritional content is associated with higher user engagement in food-related posts. Our results provide valuable insights for the design of more engaging online initiatives aimed at, for example, encouraging healthy eating habits.