Context matters – exploring how we make food decisions
Being more conscious of what, when and why we eat could help us put strategies in place to improve our eating behaviours.
IPAN PhD student Nancy Tran is investigating the context surrounding eating habits, and how to use that information to promote healthier food choices.
Her research has shown that context is key when it comes to food intake. Factors such as who you are, where you are, who you are with and what you are doing can all influence what and how much we eat.
Now she is using technology to predict what we might eat in different situations.
“I’m currently exploring machine learning, which involves teaching a computer to understand the relationship between contextual information and eating habits,” she explained.
“Once the machine has learned and tracked the behaviour, we can use it to predict the type and amount of food consumed.”
For the study, participants used a smartphone app developed to capture dietary data, to record their dietary intake in real time over three to four non-consecutive days.
Trained nutritionists then coded the dietary data consisting of food images, text descriptions, and voice responses from the app, matching them to items in the Australian Food, Supplements, and Nutrient Database 2011-2013.
“My results showed that it is possible to predict food choices from contextual information. This means that when contextual information is collected, it can explain the circumstances of when we make unhealthy, and healthy, food choices,” Ms Tran said.
She said with obesity a known epidemic, there is a need to promote healthier eating habits.
“We often don’t recognise our eating habits and the environmental cues that affect our behaviours,” she said.
“My research topic often reminds me of Kidlin’s Law, which says that if you write a problem down clearly, the problem is half solved. If we notice when we are most likely to make unhealthy eating choices, we have more power to change them.”
In the future, she thinks there may be a role for technology to make nutritional advice more personalised and accessible.
“I want to see if we can harness technology through a smartphone app to intervene when we are most likely to make an unhealthy eating choice – and replace it with a healthier alternative,” Ms Tran said.
