Does Journaling Encourage Healthier Choices?

Abstract

Past research has shown the benefits of food journaling in promoting mindful eating and healthier food choices. However, the links between journaling and healthy eating have not been thoroughly examined. Beyond caloric restriction, do journalers consistently and sufficiently consume healthful diets? How different are their eating habits compared to those of average consumers who tend to be less conscious about health? In this study, we analyze the healthy eating behaviors of active food journalers using data from MyFitnessPal. Surprisingly, our findings show that food journalers do not eat as healthily as they should despite their proclivity to health eating and their food choices resemble those of the general populace. Furthermore, we find that the journaling duration is only a marginal determinant of healthy eating outcomes and sociodemographic factors, such as gender and regions of residence, are much more predictive of healthy food choices.

Characterizing and Predicting Repeat Food Consumption Behavior for Just-in-Time Interventions

“…Next, recent studies have investigated the healthiness cues uncovered from food images posted by Instagram users [24] and online cooking recipes from Allrecipes [27]. Lastly, online food diaries data from MyFitnessPal users have been used to study individuals' dieting [8,16,34], food substitutes extraction [3], and healthy eating behaviors [2]. In contrast to the public health monitoring aspect of previous work, our work focuses on predicting food items likely to be consumed in the next consumption session which has a direct application to the just-in-time health interventions.…”

“…Food recommender systems is a potential facilitator of the just-in-time healthy eating interventions where specific food items are adaptively recommended tailored to individuals. The presence of algorithmic bias against the users in certain contexts (e.g., weekends) and demographic groups (e.g., young adults), who are less likely to adopt healthy eating behaviors [2], may adversely affect the overall success of the interventions. Next, the highly recurring and the recencybiased natures of food consumption emphasize the importance of habit formation [35] as another facilitator of sustained healthy eating lifestyle.…”

“…Habitual consumption of balanced and healthful diets is known to positively correlate with long-term physical well-being of individuals [2]. Yet, a vast number of people, including members of online weight-loss community [2], did not tend to eat as healthy as they should on a daily basis. Personalized digital health interventions could play a crucial role in helping individuals develop and maintain healthy eating habits.…”

Calorie Compensation Patterns Observed in App-Based Food Diaries

“…We used the MyFitnessPal food diary dataset created by Weber and Achananuparp [ 7 , 14 ]. The dataset contains 587,187 days of food diary entries collected from 9896 individuals spanning six months from September 2014 to April 2015.…”

“…Analysis of App-based Food Diaries: Computational studies of app-based food diaries have focused on the recommendation of food substitutes [ 11 ] or predicting next day food items [ 12 ]. A few recent studies used app-based food diary datasets to assess population-level dietary behaviors, such as consumption of different food groups (e.g., fruits and vegetables) [ 13 , 14 ] or habitual consumption [ 15 ]. Other works have identified clusters of users with similar dietary behaviors using text analysis methods on food diaries [ 16 , 17 ].…”