From Cookies to Cooks: Insights on Dietary Patterns via Analysis of Web Usage Logs

TL;DR

This study analyzes web search logs to uncover dietary patterns, regional differences, and potential health impacts related to nutrition, offering a novel, large-scale perspective on population dietary behaviors and their health correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a new method of using web search logs as a proxy for dietary preferences and explores their temporal and regional variations, including health-related behavioral insights.

Findings

Dietary preferences show yearly and weekly periodicity.

Regional differences in diet exist within the US.

Web log data correlates with health issues like heart failure.

Abstract

Nutrition is a key factor in people's overall health. Hence, understanding the nature and dynamics of population-wide dietary preferences over time and space can be valuable in public health. To date, studies have leveraged small samples of participants via food intake logs or treatment data. We propose a complementary source of population data on nutrition obtained via Web logs. Our main contribution is a spatiotemporal analysis of population-wide dietary preferences through the lens of logs gathered by a widely distributed Web-browser add-on, using the access volume of recipes that users seek via search as a proxy for actual food consumption. We discover that variation in dietary preferences as expressed via recipe access has two main periodic components, one yearly and the other weekly, and that there exist characteristic regional differences in terms of diet within the United States. In a second study, we identify users who show evidence of having made an acute decision to lose weight. We characterize the shifts in interests that they express in their search queries and focus on changes in their recipe queries in particular. Last, we correlate nutritional time series obtained from recipe queries with time-aligned data on hospital admissions, aimed at understanding how behavioral data captured in Web logs might be harnessed to identify potential relationships between diet and acute health problems. In this preliminary study, we focus on patterns of sodium identified in recipes over time and patterns of admission for congestive heart failure, a chronic illness that can be exacerbated by increases in sodium intake.