We agree that analysis of associations between weight-biased language in news media and the prevalence of eating disorders and other mental disorders correlated with weight stigma would be informative to the weight stigma literature, however our input data for the natural language processing (NLP) were textual data only and do not take into account other data modalities such as images and/or clinical data (floating numbers). In other words, NLP is a text-analytical tool to understand the nuances of human language about a certain topic (obesity in our case). This is done by capturing the contextual relationships between words and sentences in text corpus. Furthermore, this suggestion goes beyond the scope of the present paper, which focuses on associations between language biases tied to individual and structural dimensions of obesity and changes in public health policy rather than associations between language biases and changes in mental disorder prevalence. An alternative approach with the aid of NLP, would be to add mental disorders as a dimension in the analyses, but this would require a comprehensive literature review to make sure the mental disorder keywords, and their dichotomous mappings, were inclusive. Given the turnaround time for the revision (10 days), unfortunately we cannot extend the analysis in this way, but we absolutely agree with Reviewer 2 that this is an important and interesting direction for future research that can be achieved with further application of the techniques we have developed for this paper. We have acknowledged investigation of the association between news reporting on obesity and mental disorders as a fruitful direction for future research in the Discussion as follows: It is also important to examine relationships between news media reporting of obesity and health outcomes over time given, for example, medium to large meta-analytic associations between weight stigma and mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other psychopathological symptoms [new citation to be added and numbered accordingly – see below]. Emmer, C., Bosnjak, M., Mata, J. The association between weight stigma and mental health: A meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews 2020, 21:e12935. doi:10.1111/obr.12935 Comment 3:
The manuscript reports a study about weight-biased language in the Australian media across the last decades.