अमूर्त

Virtual gazing, unhealthy vlogs and food choices: A behavioral analysis.

Swati Rajput*, Poonam Sharma

Social media has become a powerful tool to influence human psychology and behaviour. Virtual gazing is becoming a habit. People gaze at varied social media sites for hours. Food which is the basic human necessity has become fancy product to be featured on various social media sites. Society today faces a problem of nutrition paradox i.e coexistence of malnourished and overweight people. Social media through vlogs of influencer (vloggers) promotes different type of junk as well as street food. The vlogs are so powerful that they impact minds of children and teenagers, to an extent that they eat frequently outside their house and land up eating oily and unhealthy stuff. There are vlogs of healthy food influencers too. They are dieticians, doctors or fitness experts. These healthy and unhealthy food vloggers have their own viewers and followers. This paper tries to examine the impact of both the kind of videos on the viewers through social media analysis. Two social media platforms have been selected for this Youtube and Instagram. To assess the impact on these two platforms, influencers of healthy food and street food have been selected and finally sentiment analysis has been done. The impact is also assessed through Google form analysis to understand the food choices and behaviour of people. The correlation is ascertained between unhealthy food vlog watchers, eating outside home, Body Mass Index and hours spend on social media. The paper finds high positive correlation among all the variables