Food Habits: Insights from Food Diaries via Computational Recurrence Measures.

ABSTRACT: Humans are creatures of habit, and hence one would expect habitual components in our diet. However, there is scant research characterizing habitual behavior in food consumption quantitatively. Longitudinal food diaries contributed by app users are a promising resource to study habitual behavior in food selection. We developed computational measures that leverage recurrence in food choices to describe the habitual component. The relative frequency and span of individual food choices are computed and used to identify recurrent choices. We proposed metrics to quantify the recurrence at both food-item and meal levels. We obtained the following insights by employing our measures on a public dataset of food diaries from MyFitnessPal users. Food-item recurrence is higher than meal recurrence. Whi

SUBMITTER: Pai A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9002488 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature