Abstract
This study presents a method laying the groundwork for systematically monitoring food quality and the healthfulness of consumers’ point-of-sale grocery purchases. The method automates the process of identifying United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Patterns Equivalent Database (FPED) components of grocery food items. The input to the process is the compact abbreviated descriptions of food items that are similar to those appearing on the point-of-sale sales receipts of most food retailers. The FPED components of grocery food items are identified using Natural Language Processing techniques combined with a collection of food concept maps and relationships that are manually built using the USDA Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, the What We Eat In America food categories, and the hierarchical organization of food items used by many grocery stores. We have established the construct validity of the method using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, but further evaluation of validity and reliability will require a large-scale reference standard with known grocery food quality measures. Here we evaluate the method’s utility in identifying the FPED components of grocery food items available in a large sample of retail grocery sales data (~190 million transaction records).
Highlights
Nutrition-related chronic diseases pose a significant burden on healthcare today, both nationally and globally [1,2,3,4]
There are good reasons to focus on the household food environment: (1) this is where most children learn their future eating habits [19,20]; (2) low income households receive benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the US, at the household level; and (3) we have shown that it is possible to make reasonable estimates of food quality based on grocery sales data that necessarily are limited to the household level [21,22,23,24]
Our method is built on an automated model for identifying the Food Patterns Equivalent Database (FPED) component values of grocery market items, starting with the short and concise label descriptions tagged to grocery items, namely, the text that appears on grocery receipts
Summary
Nutrition-related chronic diseases pose a significant burden on healthcare today, both nationally and globally [1,2,3,4]. A healthy diet can help reduce the risk of these diseases [5,6,7,8]. A healthy diet must consist of a balanced intake of different food groups in the right quantities. In the United States, such a balanced intake is embodied in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the United States Department of Health and Human Services [12]. The DGA aims to promote overall health and to reduce the risk of chronic disease, and yet studies show most
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