skip to main content
research-article
Open access

Nudging Towards Health? Examining the Merits of Nutrition Labels and Personalization in a Recipe Recommender System

Published: 04 July 2022 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • Abstract

    Food recommender systems show personalized recipes to users based on content liked previously. Despite their potential, often recommended (popular) recipes in previous studies have turned out to be unhealthy, negatively contributing to prevalent obesity problems worldwide. Changing how foods are presented through digital nudges might help, but these are usually examined in non-personalized contexts, such as a brick-and-mortar supermarket. This study seeks to support healthy food choices in a personalized interface by adding front-of-package nutrition labels to recipes in a food recommender system. After performing an offline evaluation, we conducted an online study (N = 600) with six different recommender interfaces, based on a 2 (non-personalized vs. personalized recipe advice) x 3 (No Label, Multiple Traffic Light, Nutri-Score) between-subjects design. We found that recipe choices made in the non-personalized scenario were healthier, while the use of nutrition labels (our digital nudge) reduced choice difficulty when the content was personalized.

    Supplementary Material

    MP4 File (UAMP22-18.mp4)
    Food recommender systems show personalized recipes to users based on content liked previously. Despite their potential, often recommended (popular) recipes in previous studies have turned out to be unhealthy, negatively contributing to prevalent obesity problems worldwide. Changing how foods are presented through digital nudges might help, but these are usually examined in non-personalized contexts, such as a brick-and-mortar supermarket. This study seeks to support healthy food choices in a personalized interface by adding front-of-package nutrition labels to recipes in a food recommender system. After performing an offline evaluation, we conducted an online study (N = 600) with six different recommender interfaces, based on a 2 (non-personalized vs. personalized recipe advice) x 3 (No Label, Multiple Traffic Light, Nutri-Score) between-subjects design. We found that recipe choices made in the non-personalized scenario were healthier, while the use of nutrition labels (our digital nudge) reduced choice difficulty when the content was personalized.

    References

    [1]
    Himan Abdollahpouri, Robin Burke, and Bamshad Mobasher. 2017. Controlling popularity bias in learning-to-rank recommendation. In Proceedings of the eleventh ACM conference on recommender systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 42–46.
    [2]
    Giuseppe Agapito, Barbara Calabrese, Pietro Hiram Guzzi, Mario Cannataro, Mariadelina Simeoni, Ilaria Caré, Theodora Lamprinoudi, Giorgio Fuiano, and Arturo Pujia. 2016. DIETOS: A recommender system for adaptive diet monitoring and personalized food suggestion. In 2016 IEEE 12th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob). IEEE, 1–8.
    [3]
    Arngeir Berge, Vegard Velle Sjøen, Alain D. Starke, and Christoph Trattner. 2021. Changing Salty Food Preferences with Visual and Textual Explanations in a Search Interface. In HEALTHI’21: Joint Proceedings of ACM IUI 2021 Workshops. CEUR.
    [4]
    Devis Bianchini, Valeria De Antonellis, Nicola De Franceschi, and Michele Melchiori. 2017. PREFer: A prescription-based food recommender system. Computer Standards & Interfaces 54 (2017), 64–75.
    [5]
    Dirk Bollen, Bart P Knijnenburg, Martijn C Willemsen, and Mark Graus. 2010. Understanding choice overload in recommender systems. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Recommender systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 63–70.
    [6]
    Romain Cadario and Pierre Chandon. 2020. Which healthy eating nudges work best? A meta-analysis of field experiments. Marketing Science 39, 3 (2020), 465–486.
    [7]
    Health Canada.2014. The Development and Use of a Surveillance Tool: The Classification of Foods in the Canadian Nutrient File According to Eating Well with Canada’s Food Guide. http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2014/sc-hc/H164-158-2-2014-eng.pdf
    [8]
    Julia Chantal, Serge Hercberg, World Health Organization, 2017. Development of a new front-of-pack nutrition label in France: the five-colour Nutri-Score. Public Health Panorama 3, 04 (2017), 712–725.
    [9]
    Department of Health and Social Care UK. 2016. Front of Pack nutrition labelling guidance. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/front-of-pack-nutrition-labelling-guidance
    [10]
    Pauline Ducrot, Chantal Julia, Caroline Méjean, Emmanuelle Kesse-Guyot, Mathilde Touvier, Léopold K Fezeu, Serge Hercberg, and Sandrine Péneau. 2016. Impact of different front-of-pack nutrition labels on consumer purchasing intentions: a randomized controlled trial. American journal of preventive medicine 50, 5 (2016), 627–636.
    [11]
    Manon Egnell, Zenobia Talati, Serge Hercberg, Simone Pettigrew, and Chantal Julia. 2018. Objective understanding of front-of-package nutrition labels: an international comparative experimental study across 12 countries. Nutrients 10, 10 (2018), 1542.
    [12]
    Michael D Ekstrand and Martijn C Willemsen. 2016. Behaviorism is not enough: better recommendations through listening to users. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 221–224.
    [13]
    Mehdi Elahi, Danial Khosh Kholgh, Mohammad Sina Kiarostami, Sorush Saghari, Shiva Parsa Rad, and Marko Tkalčič. 2021. Investigating the impact of recommender systems on user-based and item-based popularity bias. Information Processing & Management 58, 5 (2021), 102655.
    [14]
    Jill Freyne and Shlomo Berkovsky. 2010. Intelligent food planning: personalized recipe recommendation. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 321–324.
    [15]
    Simon Funk. 1999. Netflix update: Try this at home (December 2006). http://sifter.org/simon/journal/20061211.html
    [16]
    Mouzhi Ge, Francesco Ricci, and David Massimo. 2015. Health-aware food recommender system. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 333–334.
    [17]
    Fabian Grabenhorst, Frank P Schulte, Stefan Maderwald, and Matthias Brand. 2013. Food labels promote healthy choices by a decision bias in the amygdala. Neuroimage 74(2013), 152–163.
    [18]
    Klaus G Grunert, Laura Fernández-Celemín, Josephine M Wills, Stefan Storcksdieck genannt Bonsmann, and Liliya Nureeva. 2010. Use and understanding of nutrition information on food labels in six European countries. Journal of public health 18, 3 (2010), 261–277.
    [19]
    Klaus G Grunert and Josephine M Wills. 2007. A review of European research on consumer response to nutrition information on food labels. Journal of public health 15, 5 (2007), 385–399.
    [20]
    Morgan Harvey, Bernd Ludwig, and David Elsweiler. 2013. You are what you eat: Learning user tastes for rating prediction. In International symposium on string processing and information retrieval. Springer, 153–164.
    [21]
    Dietmar Jannach and Michael Jugovac. 2019. Measuring the business value of recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS) 10, 4(2019), 1–23.
    [22]
    Dietmar Jannach, Markus Zanker, Alexander Felfernig, and Gerhard Friedrich. 2011. An introduction to recommender systems. New York: Cambridge 10(2011), 1941904.
    [23]
    Mathias Jesse and Dietmar Jannach. 2021. Digital nudging with recommender systems: Survey and future directions. Computers in Human Behavior Reports 3 (2021), 100052.
    [24]
    Mathias Jesse, Dietmar Jannach, and Bartosz Gula. 2021. Digital Nudging for Online Food Choices. Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021).
    [25]
    Eric J Johnson, Suzanne B Shu, Benedict GC Dellaert, Craig Fox, Daniel G Goldstein, Gerald Häubl, Richard P Larrick, John W Payne, Ellen Peters, David Schkade, 2012. Beyond nudges: Tools of a choice architecture. Marketing Letters 23, 2 (2012), 487–504.
    [26]
    Daniel Kahneman. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
    [27]
    Florian G Kaiser, Oliver Arnold, and Siegmar Otto. 2014. Attitudes and defaults save lives and protect the environment jointly and compensatorily: Understanding the behavioral efficacy of nudges and other structural interventions. Behavioral sciences 4, 3 (2014), 202–212.
    [28]
    Mansura A Khan, Ellen Rushe, Barry Smyth, and David Coyle. 2019. Personalized, health-aware recipe recommendation: an ensemble topic modeling based approach. In HEALTHI’21: Joint Proceedings of ACM IUI 2021 Workshops. CEUR, 4–10.
    [29]
    Bart P Knijnenburg, Saadhika Sivakumar, and Daricia Wilkinson. 2016. Recommender systems for self-actualization. In Proceedings of the 10th acm conference on recommender systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11–14.
    [30]
    Bart P Knijnenburg, Martijn C Willemsen, Zeno Gantner, Hakan Soncu, and Chris Newell. 2012. Explaining the user experience of recommender systems. User modeling and user-adapted interaction 22, 4 (2012), 441–504.
    [31]
    Thomas C Leonard. 2008. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness.
    [32]
    Christophe Leys, Christophe Ley, Olivier Klein, Philippe Bernard, and Laurent Licata. 2013. Detecting outliers: Do not use standard deviation around the mean, use absolute deviation around the median. Journal of experimental social psychology 49, 4 (2013), 764–766.
    [33]
    Jennifer Mankoff, Gary Hsieh, Ho Chak Hung, Sharon Lee, and Elizabeth Nitao. 2002. Using low-cost sensing to support nutritional awareness. In International conference on ubiquitous computing. Springer, 371–378.
    [34]
    Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura. 1998. Mersenne twister: a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform pseudo-random number generator. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) 8, 1(1998), 3–30.
    [35]
    Cliona Ni Mhurchu, Helen Eyles, Yannan Jiang, and Tony Blakely. 2018. Do nutrition labels influence healthier food choices? Analysis of label viewing behaviour and subsequent food purchases in a labelling intervention trial. Appetite 121(2018), 360–365.
    [36]
    Stefanie Mika. 2011. Challenges for nutrition recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Context Aware Intel. Assistance, Berlin, Germany. CEUR, 25–33.
    [37]
    Cataldo Musto, Christoph Trattner, Alain Starke, and Giovanni Semeraro. 2020. Towards a knowledge-aware food recommender system exploiting holistic user models. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 333–337.
    [38]
    Pan American Health Organization. 2020/09/25. Launching of Front-of-Package Labeling as a Policy Tool for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases in the Americas. PAHO. https://www.paho.org/en/documents/front-package-labeling-policy-tool-prevention-noncommunicable-diseases-americas
    [39]
    World Health Organization. 2003. Diet, nutrition, and the prevention of chronic diseases: report of a joint WHO/FAO expert consultation. Vol. 916. World Health Organization.
    [40]
    Francesco Ricci, Lior Rokach, and Bracha Shapira. 2015. Recommender systems: introduction and challenges. In Recommender systems handbook. Springer, 1–34.
    [41]
    Osvaldo Santos, Violeta Alarcão, Rodrigo Feteira-Santos, João Fernandes, Ana Virgolino, Catarina Sena, Carlota Pacheco Vieira, Maria João Gregório, Paulo Nogueira, Pedro Graça, 2020. Impact of different front-of-pack nutrition labels on online food choices. Appetite 154(2020), 104795.
    [42]
    Barthélemy Sarda, Corinne Delamaire, Anne-Juliette Serry, and Pauline Ducrot. 2022. Changes in home cooking and culinary practices among the French population during the COVID-19 lockdown. Appetite 168(2022), 105743.
    [43]
    Hanna Schäfer, Santiago Hors-Fraile, Raghav Pavan Karumur, André Calero Valdez, Alan Said, Helma Torkamaan, Tom Ulmer, and Christoph Trattner. 2017. Towards health (aware) recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 2017 international conference on digital health. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 157–161.
    [44]
    Alain Starke. 2019. RecSys Challenges in achieving sustainable eating habits. In 4th International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems, HealthRecSys 2019. CEUR, 29–30.
    [45]
    Alain Starke, Edis Asotic, and Christoph Trattner. 2021. “Serving Each User”: Supporting Different Eating Goals Through a Multi-List Recommender Interface. In Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 124–132.
    [46]
    Alain Starke, Christoph Trattner, Hedda Bakken, Martin Johannessen, and Vegard Solberg. 2021. The cholesterol factor: Balancing accuracy and health in recipe recommendation through a nutrient-specific metric. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems (MORS 2021). CEUR, 11 pages.
    [47]
    Alain Starke, Martijn Willemsen, and Chris Snijders. 2021. Promoting Energy-Efficient Behavior by Depicting Social Norms in a Recommender Interface. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) 11, 3-4(2021), 1–32.
    [48]
    Alain D Starke and Christoph Trattner. 2021. Promoting Healthy Food Choices Online: A Case for Multi-List Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the ACM IUI 2021 Workshops. CEUR, Aachen, DE, 3 pages.
    [49]
    Alain D Starke, Martijn C Willemsen, and Christoph Trattner. 2021. Nudging healthy choices in food search through visual attractiveness. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4 (2021), 20.
    [50]
    Norman J Temple and Joy Fraser. 2014. Food labels: a critical assessment. Nutrition 30, 3 (2014), 257–260.
    [51]
    Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin.
    [52]
    Raciel Yera Toledo, Ahmad A Alzahrani, and Luis Martinez. 2019. A food recommender system considering nutritional information and user preferences. IEEE Access 7(2019), 96695–96711.
    [53]
    Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Müslüm Atas, Alexander Felfernig, and Martin Stettinger. 2018. An overview of recommender systems in the healthy food domain. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 50, 3 (2018), 501–526.
    [54]
    Thi Ngoc Trang Tran, Alexander Felfernig, Christoph Trattner, and Andreas Holzinger. 2021. Recommender systems in the healthcare domain: state-of-the-art and research issues. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 57, 1 (2021), 171–201.
    [55]
    Christoph Trattner and David Elsweiler. 2017. Investigating the healthiness of internet-sourced recipes: implications for meal planning and recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 489–498.
    [56]
    Christoph Trattner and David Elsweiler. 2019. An evaluation of recommendation algorithms for online recipe portals. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems. CEUR, Aachen, DE.
    [57]
    Christoph Trattner and David Elsweiler. 2019. Food Recommendations. In Collaborative recommendations: Algorithms, practical challenges and applications. World Scientific, 653–685.
    [58]
    Christoph Trattner, Dominik Moesslang, and David Elsweiler. 2018. On the predictability of the popularity of online recipes. EPJ Data Science 7, 1 (2018), 1–39.
    [59]
    Tsuguya Ueta, Masashi Iwakami, and Takayuki Ito. 2011. A recipe recommendation system based on automatic nutrition information extraction. In International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management. Springer, 79–90.
    [60]
    L Nynke van der Laan and Oliwia Orcholska. 2022. Effects of Digital Just-In-Time Nudges on Healthy Food Choice–a Field Experiment. Food Quality and Preference 98 (2022), 104535 pages.
    [61]
    Ellen J Van Loo, Vincenzina Caputo, Rodolfo M Nayga Jr, and Wim Verbeke. 2014. Consumers’ valuation of sustainability labels on meat. Food Policy 49(2014), 137–150.
    [62]
    Martijn C Willemsen, Mark P Graus, and Bart P Knijnenburg. 2016. Understanding the role of latent feature diversification on choice difficulty and satisfaction. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 26, 4 (2016), 347–389.
    [63]
    Martijn C Willemsen, Bart P Knijnenburg, Mark P Graus, LC Velter-Bremmers, and Kai Fu. 2011. Using latent features diversification to reduce choice difficulty in recommendation lists. RecSys 11, 2011 (2011), 14–20.
    [64]
    Feng Yu, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang, and Tieniu Tan. 2016. A dynamic recurrent model for next basket recommendation. In Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 729–732.

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Explanations in Open User Models for Personalized Information ExplorationAdjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3631700.3665188(256-263)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Promoting Green Fashion Consumption in Recommender SystemsAdjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3631700.3664922(50-54)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Avoiding Decision Fatigue with AI-Assisted Decision-MakingProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3627043.3659569(1-11)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    Index Terms

    1. Nudging Towards Health? Examining the Merits of Nutrition Labels and Personalization in a Recipe Recommender System
            Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

            Recommendations

            Comments

            Information & Contributors

            Information

            Published In

            cover image ACM Conferences
            UMAP '22: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
            July 2022
            360 pages
            ISBN:9781450392075
            DOI:10.1145/3503252
            This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

            Sponsors

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            Published: 04 July 2022

            Check for updates

            Author Tags

            1. Digital nudges
            2. Food recommendations
            3. Health
            4. Nutrition labels
            5. Personalization

            Qualifiers

            • Research-article
            • Research
            • Refereed limited

            Funding Sources

            • Research Council of Norway

            Conference

            UMAP '22
            Sponsor:

            Acceptance Rates

            Overall Acceptance Rate 162 of 633 submissions, 26%

            Contributors

            Other Metrics

            Bibliometrics & Citations

            Bibliometrics

            Article Metrics

            • Downloads (Last 12 months)562
            • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)62

            Other Metrics

            Citations

            Cited By

            View all
            • (2024)Explanations in Open User Models for Personalized Information ExplorationAdjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3631700.3665188(256-263)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
            • (2024)Promoting Green Fashion Consumption in Recommender SystemsAdjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3631700.3664922(50-54)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
            • (2024)Avoiding Decision Fatigue with AI-Assisted Decision-MakingProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3627043.3659569(1-11)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
            • (2024)Promoting Green Fashion Consumption Through Digital Nudges in Recommender SystemsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.334971012(6812-6829)Online publication date: 2024
            • (2023)Recommender systems for sustainability: overview and research issuesFrontiers in Big Data10.3389/fdata.2023.12845116Online publication date: 30-Oct-2023
            • (2023)HUMMUS: A Linked, Healthiness-Aware, User-centered and Argument-Enabling Recipe Data Set for RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3609491(1-11)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023
            • (2023)Service-based Presentation of Multimodal Information for the Justification of Recommender Systems ResultsProceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3565472.3592962(46-53)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
            • (2023)Synchronized Multi-list User Interfaces for Fashion CatalogsAdjunct Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3563359.3597382(224-228)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
            • (2023)Enriching Recommender Systems Results with Data about Sustainability and Ethical Standards of Brands2023 IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WI-IAT59888.2023.00037(238-242)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
            • (2023)Image-Based Information Filtering to Compare and Select Items2023 IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WI-IAT59888.2023.00007(1-8)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
            • Show More Cited By

            View Options

            View options

            PDF

            View or Download as a PDF file.

            PDF

            eReader

            View online with eReader.

            eReader

            HTML Format

            View this article in HTML Format.

            HTML Format

            Get Access

            Login options

            Media

            Figures

            Other

            Tables

            Share

            Share

            Share this Publication link

            Share on social media