A feed of real-time information from newspapers, celebrities, politicians, and sports teams makes Twitter a continuous newswire. Credible sources? Perhaps not always; but the popular social network is certainly a great place to get updates and articles from your favorite users.

If you have yet to give in to the Twitterverse, here’s how it works: after creating an account you can choose to follow other users based on your interests or your field of work, or just follow friends and family. You’ll then be able to see their tweets (140-character updates) all on one page. Many tweets include links to articles or other websites, or even photos or videos. Here at Integrative Nutrition, we use Twitter to stay in touch with our students and grads, read articles from our nutrition experts, plus follow major news outlets and organizations to stay in the know about current events related to health and wellness.

We previously shared our Twitter lists of doctors and health experts, as well as healthy recipe bloggers, and now we’re sharing our list for health news, so you can stay up to date on the latest nutrition news!

@nytimeshealth – Regular updates from The New York Times Health page, with a ton of content on the health industry, as well as links to the @nytimeswell blog and new recipes.

@NutritionBlogs – Tweets from the Nutrition Blog Network, a site run by dieticians and nutrition experts who share reliable nutrition information, recipes and health tips.

@health_news – A popular user that tweets health-related articles from a variety of sites. There are multiple tweets an hour so you’ll always find something good.

You’re a food blog fanatic and surfing the net for new recipes is high up on your list of favorite pastimes. You’re always on the lookout for mouth-watering photos, and you love sharing your new finds with friends. Does this sound like you? If so, it’s time to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. Follow the right users and voila! You’ve got yourself a virtual recipe book, complete with tips, videos and photos.

We’re going to make it easy for you by sharing Twitter users we think are of value to the Integrative Nutrition community. If you’re already on Twitter, check out this list and follow away! We previously shared a list of doctors and health experts, and now we’re bringing you bloggers and authors that post healthy recipes on Twitter, complete with several students and graduates of the Health Coach Training Program.

As the Twitter-verse continues to grow, it can get pretty tough to wade through all the information floating around. Unless you don’t mind your Twitter feed getting congested with a bunch of celebrity gossip or random trends, "who do I follow?" becomes an important question. That’s why we’ve created a comprehensive guide to Twitter that we believe is of value to the Integrative Nutrition community! Below you’ll find doctors and experts in nutrition that are active on social media and worth following. Many are speakers at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and several are graduates of the Health Coach Training Program.

Doctors and Health Experts on Twitter:

 The growing size of American waistlines has been in the news quite a bit lately.  The suggestion is, that if trends stay the same, half of the adults in at least six states will be considered obese by 2018.  How did this happen?  Some attributing factors include the consumption of high calorie food with little nutritional value, people looking for instant gratification in a fast food nation and a food system that is based on profits for the food industry.  But perhaps, many people are starving for real nourishment in their lives.  The foods you eat are secondary to all the other things that feed you—your relationships, career, spirituality, and exercise routine. Those are the things we call primary foods.

An article by David Rock compares our food system and the way we socialize on the internet. He poses the question: are our minds going the way of our waists? Social Media sites are powerhouses on the internet today.  Everyone you know seems to be updating their Facebook status several times a day. And even public figures like President Obama and Ashton Kucher are “tweeting”. People are looking for social connections and finding instant gratification in the way of “likes”, comments, and re-tweets.  As David Rock points out, “The trouble is connecting socially online may be like eating empty calories. Yet when we connect with people online, we don't tend to get the calming reward that happens when we bond with someone in real time. As a result, you want more and more social connections. On Twitter, you rarely get to feel satisfied and 'full' the way you might if you chatted in person with 50 people at a conference.”
 
While we update our status; are we really just searching for meaningful relationships?  What are your thoughts?