Food Habits: Insights from Food Diaries via Computational Recurrence Measures

dc.citation.articleNumber2753en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber7en_US
dc.citation.journalTitleSensorsen_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber22en_US
dc.contributor.authorPai, Amrutaen_US
dc.contributor.authorSabharwal, Ashutoshen_US
dc.contributor.orgScalable Health Labsen_US
dc.date.accessioned2022-04-28T14:29:15Zen_US
dc.date.available2022-04-28T14:29:15Zen_US
dc.date.issued2022en_US
dc.description.abstractHumans 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. While food-item recurrence increases with the average number of food-items chosen per meal, meal recurrence decreases. Recurrence is the strongest at breakfast, weakest at dinner, and higher on weekdays than on weekends. Individuals with relatively high recurrence on weekdays also have relatively high recurrence on weekends. Our quantitatively observed trends are intuitive and aligned with common notions surrounding habitual food consumption. As a potential impact of the research, profiling habitual behaviors using the proposed recurrent consumption measures may reveal unique opportunities for accessible and sustainable dietary interventions.en_US
dc.identifier.citationPai, Amruta and Sabharwal, Ashutosh. "Food Habits: Insights from Food Diaries via Computational Recurrence Measures." <i>Sensors,</i> 22, no. 7 (2022) MDPI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22072753.en_US
dc.identifier.digitalsensors-22-02753-v2en_US
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.3390/s22072753en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/112198en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherMDPIen_US
dc.rightsThis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citeden_US
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/en_US
dc.titleFood Habits: Insights from Food Diaries via Computational Recurrence Measuresen_US
dc.typeJournal articleen_US
dc.type.dcmiTexten_US
dc.type.publicationpublisher versionen_US
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