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<p>Dieting is a known risk factor for eating disorders (ED), but how diet culture intersects with ED in online communities is not well understood. ED forums reveal lived psychological and behavioral experiences, while broader dieting culture—shaped by restrictive norms and body hierarchies—may inadvertently foster disordered behaviors. Here we map the structural and thematic links between ED- and diet-related forums on Reddit. We constructed forum-level semantic similarity and co-engagement networks, and applied community detection to identify clusters of dieting forums surrounding ED forums. To interpret these clusters, we quantified the prevalence of 13 clinically relevant topics using annotations from an ensemble of large language models. We find that ED and diet forums showed significantly greater semantic and behavioral overlap than expected by chance, with shared emphasis on nutritional restriction, food cravings, body dissatisfaction, and family or social relationships. These findings highlight the entanglement of ED and diet culture in online discourse and underscore the need for nuanced public health strategies that address both ED-specific and broader dieting discussions in online spaces.</p>

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The extended community of diet culture around eating disorders: a network analysis of reddit forums

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月30日

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  • Jiaxing Qiu,
  • Cheri A. Levinson,
  • Jonathan Michael Kropko,
  • Teague R. Henry,
  • Alexander J. Gates

摘要

Dieting is a known risk factor for eating disorders (ED), but how diet culture intersects with ED in online communities is not well understood. ED forums reveal lived psychological and behavioral experiences, while broader dieting culture—shaped by restrictive norms and body hierarchies—may inadvertently foster disordered behaviors. Here we map the structural and thematic links between ED- and diet-related forums on Reddit. We constructed forum-level semantic similarity and co-engagement networks, and applied community detection to identify clusters of dieting forums surrounding ED forums. To interpret these clusters, we quantified the prevalence of 13 clinically relevant topics using annotations from an ensemble of large language models. We find that ED and diet forums showed significantly greater semantic and behavioral overlap than expected by chance, with shared emphasis on nutritional restriction, food cravings, body dissatisfaction, and family or social relationships. These findings highlight the entanglement of ED and diet culture in online discourse and underscore the need for nuanced public health strategies that address both ED-specific and broader dieting discussions in online spaces.