Data triangulation using Sketch Engine and WMatrix: Ketogenic diet on Twitter

This paper aims at analyzing the discoursal strategies used on social media when speaking about Ketogenic Diet (KD) as a medical treatment for various neurological and genetic illnesses (such as, for instance, epilepsy, migraine, glycogenosis type 5) and as an easy way for losing weight. In particular, by triangulating methodological approaches, it will compare how discourse is constructed on twitter to support ketogenic groups with the purpose of seeing how discourse around KD, ketogenic food and ketogenic food talk is used to engage in health communication and how health communication is popularized in the social media. The corpus will be investigated in a quantitative analysis focusing on patterns of argumentative discourse in order to identify recurrent schemes and their relation in the construction of KD discursive structure. On the one hand, we will see how discourse on KD reveals the KD is a proper medical treatment in consideration of the neurological diseases for which is it followed, particularly in those cases in which patients show a drug-resistant treatment condition; on the other, we will describe when discourse about ketogenic food seems to emphasize the ‘virtues’ KD has for losing weight. At the same time, I will show how health communication is popularized as a discursive practice via social media.