Food communities on online platforms enjoy great popularity among social media users. Due to the far-reaching consequences of food-related content on user eating behavior, recent research has studied the factors that drive user online engagement with food. While most of these studies have focused on visual aspects of food content in social media, only a few initial studies have explored the impact of nutritional content on user engagement. In this paper, we set out to close this gap and analyze food-related posts on Reddit, focusing on the association between the calories and macronutrients of a meal and engagement levels, particularly the number of comments. To that end, we collect and analyze almost half a million food-related posts and uncover differences in nutritional content between engaging and non-engaging posts. Moreover, we train a series of XGBoost models, and evaluate the importance of nutritional content while predicting user engagement and how posts will resonate with the community. We find that nutritional features improve the baseline model's accuracy by almost 5%, with a positive contribution of calorie density towards the prediction of engagement, suggesting that higher nutritional content is associated with higher levels of user engagement in food-related posts. Our results provide valuable insights for the design of more engaging online initiatives aimed at, for example, encouraging healthy eating habits.

翻译：在线平台上的美食社区在社交媒体用户中广受欢迎。由于与食物相关的内容对用户饮食行为具有深远影响，近年来的研究探讨了驱动用户在线参与食物讨论的因素。虽然大多数研究聚焦于社交媒体中食物内容的视觉特征，仅有少量初步研究探索了营养含量对用户互动的影响。本文旨在弥补这一空白，通过分析Reddit上关于食物的帖子，重点关注一餐的热量与宏量营养素与互动水平（特别是评论数量）之间的关联。为此，我们收集并分析了近50万条与食物相关的帖子，揭示了高互动与低互动帖子在营养含量上的差异。此外，我们训练了一系列XGBoost模型，评估了营养含量在预测用户互动及帖子如何与社区产生共鸣方面的重要性。研究发现，营养特征将基线模型的准确率提升了近5%，其中卡路里密度对互动预测具有正向贡献，这表明更高的营养含量与更高的用户互动水平相关。我们的结果为设计更具互动性的在线活动（例如鼓励健康饮食习惯）提供了宝贵见解。