This study investigated the contents and linguistic styles that adolescents use in their dietary communications on social media. The main aim of the study was to describe adolescents' social media communication practices with regards to diet, in order to better understand dietary social influences and how to effectively intervene in them. The current study made use of an online communication dataset (N = 72,384 messages) of adolescents in primary and secondary school (N = 1038, 9–16 y/o). We analyzed the message content using tailor-made diet- and health-related dictionaries and LDA topic modeling. The linguistic style of the messages was investigated by assessing the sentiment and underlying psychological dimensions. Further, we used multivariate linear regressions to test how each message dimension was related to message liking, which was considered as an indicator of a message's influence potential regarding peers' dietary behaviors. The results confirmed that adolescents show a preference to discuss neutral-to-unhealthy dietary items most often. No association emerged between message content (i.e., message healthiness and topics) and the number of likes that a message received, while messages with more positive sentiment and higher subjectivity received slightly more likes. Also, our findings confirm that visual dietary content is more often liked than textual descriptions alone. The findings indicate that the content and the healthiness of a message does not explain its popularity among adolescents. Rather, the way how diet-related content is formulated (i.e., in a positive and subjective tone) emerged as a more important predictor for message liking.

本研究调查了青少年在社交媒体上进行饮食交流时使用的内容和语言风格。该研究的主要目的是描述青少年在饮食方面的社交媒体交流实践，以便更好地了解饮食的社会影响以及如何有效干预这些影响。本研究利用了 中小学青少年（N = 1038，9-16 岁）。我们使用量身定制的饮食和健康相关词典和 LDA 主题建模来分析消息内容。通过评估情绪和潜在的心理维度来研究消息的语言风格。此外，我们使用多元线性回归来测试每个消息维度如何与消息喜欢相关，这被认为是消息对同伴饮食行为的影响潜力的指标。结果证实，青少年最常倾向于讨论中性到不健康的饮食项目。消息内容（即消息健康度和主题）与消息收到的点赞数之间没有关联，而具有更积极情绪和更高主观性的消息收到的点赞数略多。还，我们的研究结果证实，视觉饮食内容比单独的文字描述更容易受到喜爱。研究结果表明，信息的内容和健康程度并不能解释其在青少年中的受欢迎程度。相反，如何制定与饮食相关的内容（即以积极和主观的语气）的方式成为更重要的信息喜好预测指标。