Baby Weaning Poster

Portrayals of infant feeding practices on social media: Baby-led weaning on Instagram

1. Portrayals of infant feeding practices on social media:
Baby-led weaning on Instagram
Allison Doub Hepworth, MS
1
, Meg Small, PhD
1
, Leann Birch, PhD
2
, and Timothy R. Brick, PhD
1
1
Penn State University
2
University of Georgia
Background Methods Results
Conclusions
Research Questions
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DGE1255832 and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 2011-67001-30117
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The introduction of solid foods is a
feeding milestone as infants transition
from a milk-based diet to foods that
vary in texture, flavor, and nutritional
quality.

Baby-led weaning is one approach to
introducing solid foods in which parents
offer soft table foods instead of puréed
foods as the first foods for infant
consumption.
1,2

Social media is a large-scale, naturalistic
setting to observe the types of foods
that are fed to infants by parents
following the baby-led weaning
approach during this critical stage.
3


The current study used natural language
processing and qualitative content
analysis to identify specific foods
associated with baby-led weaning on
Instagram.

Data collection
All Instagram posts (English, USA) that
included the hashtag #babyledweaning
were collected using PulsarTrac over a
15-day period: 11/26 – 12/11/2015.

Analyses
Text data from image captions were pre-
processed and then tagged for part-of-
speech using ‘treetaggerwrapper’ in
Python 3. The frequency and
distribution of nouns were calculated
using ‘nltk’ in Python 3.

Frequently occurring nouns were filtered
and coded using qualitative content
analysis by the first author to identify
words that referred to specific foods and
beverages. Resulting foods and
beverages were evaluated for their
potential to promote a variety of tastes
and textures to the infant diet.
PulsarTrac collected 1,397 Instagram posts
from 750 unique public accounts and 141
posts from private accounts. Image captions
contained 4,614 unique nouns. Based on the
frequency distribution (see Figure 1), nouns
that occurred ≥ 20 times ( n = 223) were
coded for specific foods and beverages.

There were 68 unique specific foods and
beverages, ranging from spices (e.g.,
cinnamon, basil), drinks (e.g., juice,
smoothies), and mixed dishes (e.g., soup).
Foods associated with baby-led weaning on Instagram represented a variety
of tastes and textures from all major food groups, but also discretionary
calories (e.g., chocolate, cake).

Cheese, milk, and yogurt were common foods, which may contribute to high
levels of saturated fat consumption, as observed in a previous study.
4


More research is needed on the nutritional quality of foods offered by
parents following the baby-led weaning approach.

What types of foods and beverages are
associated with the baby-led weaning
approach to infant feeding on
Instagram?

References
1. Rapley & Murkett (2010). Baby-Led Weaning: The Essential Guide to Introducing Solid Food. Workman Publishing, New York, NY
2. Brown & Lee (2013). Maternal & Child Nutrition, 9(2)
3. Doub, Small, & Birch (2016). Appetite, 99
4. Morison et al. 2016). BMJ Open, 6(5)
Image caption: Someone really
enjoyed his grilled cheese and
broccoli! #babyledweaning
The ten most frequent were: cheese (n = 158), banana (n = 138), chicken
(n = 130), rice (n = 113), pasta (n = 94), yogurt/yoghurt (n = 94), potato
(n = 92), milk (n = 89), toast (n = 88), and egg (n = 86).
Figure 1. Frequency distribution of the 223 most common nouns
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
babyledweaning
breakfast
lunch
chicken
time
instafood
potato spinach
soup sauce butter week
tsp
flour yum
bit
bread meal
mummyblogger
snack
bayiasi yogurt
healthybabyfood
sugar
instamum porridge
blog
life
plate
realfood method
everything
fish post
blwinspiration
son
chocolate smoothie
homemadebabyfood
dish bake
latergram vegetable
pancake kidsmeal blueberry
syrup
mushroom
girl
broth
tray
sarahledweaning
oats
kembar
cauliflower bayikembar