Computational Analysis of Superfood Representations in News Media

Abstract

What do berries, avocado, quinoa, and ginger have in common? These food items are often regarded as superfoods, a marketing term that overstates the importance of single food items for one’s health and wellbeing. In the present paper, we set out to investigate how purported superfoods are represented in the discourse of online news. We use computational language models to extract the unique topics and terms used to discuss superfoods. Our results show that news coverage is dominated by many specific claims about the healing properties of superfoods. The structural topic model further demonstrates that articles mentioning superfoods are more likely to include topics about a) nutrients, physical appearance, and health in the same context, b) retail strategies, and c) scientific research about the health benefits of superfoods. These results illustrate complex representations of superfoods in news media.