Scalable Health Labs, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Apr 2;22(7):2753. doi: 10.3390/s22072753.
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. 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.
人类是习惯的生物，因此人们会期望我们的饮食中存在习惯性成分。然而，很少有研究从定量的角度来描述食物消费中的习惯性行为。应用程序用户提供的纵向食物日记是研究食物选择中习惯性行为的有前途的资源。我们开发了计算措施，利用食物选择中的重现来描述习惯性成分。计算并使用个别食物选择的相对频率和跨度来识别重复选择。我们提出了在 MyFitnessPal 用户的公共食物日记数据集上使用我们的度量标准来量化食物项目和膳食水平的重现性的指标。食物项目的重现性高于膳食的重现性。虽然食物项目的重现性随每餐选择的食物项目的平均数量增加而增加，但膳食的重现性却降低。重现性在早餐时最强，晚餐时最弱，工作日比周末高。工作日重现性相对较高的个体在周末也有相对较高的重现性。我们观察到的定量趋势是直观的，与围绕习惯性食物消费的常见概念一致。作为研究的潜在影响，使用建议的反复消费措施对习惯性行为进行分析可能会揭示可及性和可持续性饮食干预的独特机会。
