“Five Foods to Eat if You Have Covid-19”. Health Claims in Food-Related Communication in Time of Crisis

The volume of popular literature, television and radio programs, online forums, social media content, and blogs regarding the reparative and restorative qualities of food and drink has significantly escalated during the past two decades. As the public has gained greater awareness of the connection between nutrition and health, it has simultaneously become increasingly confused about dietary choices. The commercialisation of several diets, each asserting to be the safest and healthiest, has engendered doubt over our dietary choices, resulting in increasing unease. Individuals especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes experience heightened anxiety, fearing that certain medications may lead to future mortality and that this might be mitigated through appropriate dietary choices.
This corpus-driven study aims to detect the extent to which (if any) the scientific dissemination of health claims in food-related communication in times of crisis (COVID-19) is decoded by laypeople and what information laypeople process and retain. In the first phase of our corpus-driven investigation, we gathered information through official documentation in English provided by the WHO and published in PubMed in relation to food consumption and COVID-19 treatment. Parallel to this, we explored through social media (namely Twitter) if and how laypeople understand, interpret and re-encode such food-related messages conveying health claims. The aim is to identify linguistic features that play a key role in the understanding of food-related information in relation to COVID-19 treatment