Using food intake records to estimate compliance with the Eatwell plate dietary guidelines

This work was supported by the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Division. The original studies, from which the current data were taken, were funded by the Food Standards Agency, UK, and the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Association, London, UK.Peer reviewedPostprin

Hierarchical Attention Network for Visually-aware Food Recommendation

Food recommender systems play an important role in assisting users to identify the desired food to eat. Deciding what food to eat is a complex and multi-faceted process, which is influenced by many factors such as the ingredients, appearance of the recipe, the user's personal preference on food, and various contexts like what had been eaten in the past meals. In this work, we formulate the food recommendation problem as predicting user preference on recipes based on three key factors that determine a user's choice on food, namely, 1) the user's (and other users') history; 2) the ingredients of a recipe; and 3) the descriptive image of a recipe. To address this challenging problem, we develop a dedicated neural network based solution Hierarchical Attention based Food Recommendation (HAFR) which is capable of: 1) capturing the collaborative filtering effect like what similar users tend to eat; 2) inferring a user's preference at the ingredient level; and 3) learning user preference from the recipe's visual images. To evaluate our proposed method, we construct a large-scale dataset consisting of millions of ratings from AllRecipes.com. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several competing recommender solutions like Factorization Machine and Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking with an average improvement of 12%, offering promising results in predicting user preference for food. Codes and dataset will be released upon acceptance

The Cholesterol Factor: Balancing Accuracy and Health in Recipe Recommendation Through a Nutrient-Specific Metric

Whereas many food recommender systems optimize for users’ preferences, health is another but often overlooked objective. This paper aims to recommend relevant recipes that avoid nutrients that contribute to high levels of cholesterol, such as saturated fat and sugar. We introduce a novel metric called ‘The Cholesterol Factor’, based on nutritional guidelines from the Norwegian Directorate of Health, that can balance accuracy and health through linear re-weighting in post-filtering. We tested popular recommender approaches by evaluating a recipe dataset from AllRecipes.com, in which a CF-based SVD method outperformed content-based and hybrid methods. Although we found that increasing the healthiness of a recommended recipe set came at the cost of Precision and Recall metrics, only putting little weight (10-15%) on our Cholesterol Factor can significantly improve the healthiness of a recommendation set with minimal accuracy losses.publishedVersio

Consumer Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Food Safety in Portugal

The recent food crises and its great diffusion through the media had as consequence a reduction of the European consumer's confidence, in general, and of the Portuguese ones in particular, in the products that they buy and consume. These events also served to disclose some of the existing problems in the current marketing chain, in which many sectors result to have low, or no transparency or unknown ones to the consumers. For moreover, these crises had demonstrated that science and technology, in set with the governmental regulation do not offer guarantees that the risks associated with food have acceptable levels. All these questions triggered the interest of researchers to study the impact of food safety related issues on consumer behaviour. The objective of this paper is to increase knowledge on Portuguese consumer perceptions and attitudes towards food safety. Specially, consumers' level of concern about food crises, their view on the safety of several products throughout the supply chain and the assessment of different practices that may reduce food poisoning risks are here analysed. Likewise, the role of labels and the different information channels on purchasing habits are studied. Internet interviews have been used as the main source of information and have been conducted throughout Portugal and addressed to a sample of 1497 persons, representing the different geographic areas and age groups. The results indicate that, with exception of the residence place, the other socio-economic variables play an ever-decreasing role when explaining the consumer behaviour. The factors measuring lifestyle, especially those related to safety, and mainly, consumption experience, seem to be the main aspects explaining Portuguese consumers' perception on food safety. For moreover, one evidences of the reading of labels, the date of caducity is the information more consulted by the consumers, leaving of part other important food safety information and relation diet versus health, such as the instructions of storage and cooking, the nutritional value and the ingredients. In order to restore the confidence lost, an effort of diffusion of clear and truthful information is necessary, for beyond the necessity of an efficient coordination throughout all the marketing chain in order to offer food safety products.food safety, consumer behaviour, perceptions, attitudes, Portugal, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Food4toddlers. Fostering healthy dietary habits through targeting toddlers' food and eating environment : The Food4toddlers study

Aims and objectives: 1) to develop, implement, and evaluate an eHealth intervention, aiming to promote healthy dietary habits in toddlers by targeting parents’ awareness of their child’s food and eating environments, and 2) to examine associations between parental food choice motives, parental feeding practices, and children’s fruit and vegetable intake. Results: The study’s rationale and development were described in a protocol paper, along with a presentation of the baseline characteristics of the included participants. In total, 404 parents signed up for participation, and 298 answered baseline questionnaires and were randomized into either the control (n=150) or intervention (n=148) group. Most of the parents were highly educated mothers. From baseline to the first follow-up there was a significant time by group interaction for the frequency of vegetable intake (p = 0.02), showing a higher change in intake in the intervention group compared with the control group (paper III). A borderline significant between-group difference in the variety of vegetable intake in favor of the intervention group was seen from baseline to both follow-ups. No significant differences were observed for other food groups. The process evaluation of the study (paper IV) revealed that 86.5% of the participants in the intervention group visited the website. Most parents found the website appropriate to the child’s age as well as self-explanatory (86–95%) and appreciated the layout and interface (55–63%). The recipes were valued as the most appreciated element included in the website. Highly educated participants (> 4 years of university/college) reported that they used end learned more from the website than participants with ≤ 4 years of education. Regarding the second aim (paper II), the results showed that higher parental scores on health motives were associated with a higher child intake of vegetables (τ = 0.394 (SE = 0.098), p < 0.001). No associations with fruit or vegetables were found for other parental food choice motives. Some associations between food choice motives and child vegetable or fruit intakes were mediated by the feeding practices assessed, though solely for health and sensory appeal motives. Effect sizes of the observed associations were generally small. Conclusions: Our findings support the use of eHealth interventions for supporting parents in their children's dietary upbringing. Through making the parents aware of dietary determinants and encouraging them to create a healthy food and eating environment, child diet was slightly improved, i.e., higher vegetable intake in the intervention group was observed. The intervention was well received by the parents, although especially by highly educated parents. Still, we did not manage to engage 13% of the participants, who did not enter the website at all. Health motives were associated with child vegetable intake, and healthpromoting feeding practices had some mediation effect. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the relations affecting toddler’s eating habits. However, more research is needed to examine the prospective and experimental evidence of interventions to enhance toddlers’ diet and to clarify interactions between elements in the child’s food and eating environment that affect the diet.publishedVersio

Processed foods and the nutrition transition: evidence from Asia

This paper elucidates the role of processed foods and beverages in the ‘nutrition transition’ underway in Asia. Processed foods tend to be high in nutrients associated with obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases: refined sugar, salt, saturated and trans-fats. This paper identifies the most significant ‘product vectors’ for these nutrients and describes changes in their consumption in a selection of Asian countries. Sugar, salt and fat consumption from processed foods has plateaued in high-income countries, but has rapidly increased in the lower– middle and upper–middle-income countries. Relative to sugar and salt, fat consumption in the upper–middle- and lower–middle-income countries is converging most rapidly with that of high-income countries. Carbonated soft drinks, baked goods, and oils and fats are the most significant vectors for sugar, salt and fat respectively. At the regional level there appears to be convergence in consumption patterns of processed foods, but country-level divergences including high levels of consumption of oils and fats in Malaysia, and soft drinks in the Philippines and Thailand. This analysis suggests that more action is needed by policy-makers to prevent or mitigate processed food consumption. Comprehensive policy and regulatory approaches are most likely to be effective in achieving these goals

An evaluation of recommendation algorithms for online recipe portals

Better models of food preferences are required to realise the oft touted potential of food recommenders to aid with the obesity crisis. Many of the food recommender evaluations in the literature have been performed with small convenience samples, which limits our conidence in the generalisability of the results. In this work we test a range of collaborative iltering (CF) and content-based (CB) recommenders on a large dataset crawled from the web consisting of naturalistic user interaction data over a 15 year period. The results reveal strengths and limitations of diferent approaches. While CF approaches consistently outperform CB approaches when testing on the complete dataset, our experiments show that to improve on CF methods require a large number of users (> 637 when sampling randomly). Moreover the results show diferent facets of recipe content to ofer utility. In particular one of the strongest content related features was a measure of health derived from guidelines from the UK Food Safety Agency. This inding underlines the challenges we face as a community to develop recommender algorithms, which improve the healthfulness of the food people choose to eat.publishedVersio