Internal Structure of Dietary Habits as a Restriction on Healthy Eating Policy in Japan

TL;DR

The paper explores how dietary patterns in Japan reveal constraints on healthy eating policies, showing that food choices are linked and may affect mental health.

Contribution

A novel statistical model groups food items based on consumption patterns to inform healthier eating policies.

Findings

115 food items were grouped into three distinct dietary clusters for both genders, with gender-specific differences.

Mental health indicators like 'extremely tired' were negatively associated with certain food groups in females.

The internal structure of dietary habits suggests a constraint for designing effective healthy eating policies.

Abstract

Although promoting healthy eating is a policy objective, the manageability of dietary habits remains uncertain. Personal dietary patterns reflect many factors, some of which are relatively manageable for individuals whilst others are not. In this article, assuming that some sort of information about the manageability of dietary habits is contained in the observed patterns of food consumption, we focused on dietary patterns on their own. We introduced a statistical descriptive model for data from a food frequency questionnaire, estimated the strength of pairwise linkage between foodstuffs, and grouped foodstuffs by applying community detection to the networks of the estimated inter-food linkages. Those linkages represent the co-movement of pairs of food in consumption. Furthermore, we demonstrated an analysis of the relationship between mental health and dietary habits, considering the aspect of the manageability of dietary habits. Using an observational study in Japan, we obtained the following results: 115 foodstuffs were divided into three groups for both genders, but the compositions were different by gender; in the analysis of mental and physical health, some stress response items were associated with a dependence on some of those food groupings (e.g., “extremely tired” was negatively associated with a group containing tomatoes, cucumber, mandarin, etc., for female subjects). As the grouping of foodstuffs based on our estimation depicted an internal structure of dietary habit that a healthy eating policy could regard as a constraint, it follows that we should design such a policy along the same lines as that grouping.

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