Should I stay or should I go? How the human brain manages the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. The funders had no role in the design of the study in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results. The authors declare no conflict of interest. As a potential impact of the research, profiling habitual behaviors using the proposed recurrent consumption measures may reveal unique opportunities for accessible and sustainable dietary interventions. Our quantitatively observed trends are intuitive and aligned with common notions surrounding habitual food consumption. Individuals with relatively high recurrence on weekdays also have relatively high recurrence on weekends. Recurrence is the strongest at breakfast, weakest at dinner, and higher on weekdays than on weekends.
While food-item recurrence increases with the average number of food-items chosen per meal, meal recurrence decreases. Food-item recurrence is higher than meal recurrence. We obtained the following insights by employing our measures on a public dataset of food diaries from MyFitnessPal users. We proposed metrics to quantify the recurrence at both food-item and meal levels. The relative frequency and span of individual food choices are computed and used to identify recurrent choices. We developed computational measures that leverage recurrence in food choices to describe the habitual component. Longitudinal food diaries contributed by app users are a promising resource to study habitual behavior in food selection. However, there is scant research characterizing habitual behavior in food consumption quantitatively. Humans are creatures of habit, and hence one would expect habitual components in our diet.