February 18, 2014 | 4 minute read

I am not a cancer expert.

So when I want to get a sense of the state of research related to nutrition and cancer I turn to resources like the AICR. But many people don’t know about such resources, and this is reflected in cancer knowledge. For instance, the AICR’s own survey found that 42% of Americans don’t think that a healthy diet can reduce cancer risk, and fewer are aware of associations with specific foods such as processed meat.

What resources are people visiting, and what are they talking about? One way to get a glimpse of this is to mine Twitter, which I did for the last couple weeks, collecting about 420,000 tweets containing the word “cancer”. From these, I used the list of terms and their derivatives from this AICR/WCRF report, along with other health related terms that I came up with (82 in total) to assemble a list of 14,585 tweets for analysis of the links being posted.

Of links being tweeted, I weighted them by the number of followers that they were potentially exposed to. Below are some of the top that are related to nutrition or activity and cancer. These are disturbing sources being exposed to hundreds of thousands of people.

Looking at the top 5 nutrition related terms from the full set of tweets, they appear to be driven by 2 items. The first is a tweet from a popular “fact” account that claims green tea + white mushrooms can reduce breast cancer risk by 89% – which does not give a source but is likely this epidemiological study in Chinese women. This is rather irresponsible without context or a source, and single studies are never conclusive. In fact, Schoenfield and Ioannidis found in 2012 that just about any ingredient in a cookbook has at least 1 study associating it with cancer, though many are implausible and subsequent research usually weakens or removes the effect. Media reports about intravenous vitamin C and chemotherapy based on a new study that has many caveats and red flags makes vitamin the top word.

Of tweets containing cancer, I looked at some word associations to explore what some diet or activity words are commonly linked. For an example of how to read this, cancer tweets containing “eat” also contain “pizza” 65% of the time.

“eat”

Looking through the tweets, these words are all largely influenced by popular twitter accounts promoting pizza to reduce cancer risk, or the above green tea + white mushrooms tweet.

“supplement”

“Antioxidants” comes from a tweet claiming antioxidants in bread crust can combat cancer. That is a generous extrapolation to humans to say the least.

“nutrition”

Finally, these were actually pretty good and support current consensus.

Below I plotted the locations of the people tweeting about cancer, who are clearly largely in the US. This likely reflects the diverse social media platforms around the world, something to consider for public health organizations and health professionals trying to target specific populations.

Twitter can be a good platform for disseminating information but is currently most influenced in the cancer area by non-credible sources. Although it is common sense that the internet in general can be a cesspool of misinformation, a dive into some popular sources reinforce that effective health communicators are still urgently needed to popularize and provide credible information to those who seek it and address common cancer myths on social media.

Colby Vorland, MSc is a nutrition science graduate student. He blogs about various research topics in nutrition at http://www.nutsci.org and is on Twitter @nutsci.