Abstract
Recipe websites are becoming increasingly popular to support people in their home cooking. However, most of these websites prioritize popular recipes, which tend to be unhealthy. Drawing upon research on visual biases and nudges, this paper investigates whether healthy food choices can be supported in food search by depicting attractive images alongside recipes, as well as by re-ranking search results on health. After modelling the visual attractiveness of recipe images, we asked 239 users to search for specific online recipes and to select those they liked the most. Our analyses revealed that users tended to choose a healthier recipe if a visually attractive image was depicted alongside it, as well as if it was listed at the top of a list of search results. Even though less popular recipes were promoted this way, it did not come at the cost of a user’s level of satisfaction.
Highlights
Individual food choices are fundamental in the prevention of obesity and its health consequences (Chan and Woo, 2010)
This paper presents two main contributions: 1. The first user study in the context of food search that shows and models how healthy food choices can be promoted without decreasing user satisfaction, by adapting the visual attractiveness of presented recipe images and re-ranking search results on their healthiness
We examined to what extent visual enhancement and health reranking of the search results led to healthier choices, without decreasing user satisfaction
Summary
Individual food choices are fundamental in the prevention of obesity and its health consequences (Chan and Woo, 2010). The World Health Organization states that the full effect of one’s individual responsibility can only be achieved when people have access to a healthy lifestyle (WHO, 2018), which should be both enabled and supported by the environment in which food choices are made (Furst et al, 1996). AI is used to optimize the relevance of the presented content through search and retrieval algorithms, which typically lead the promotion of popular recipes to all users (Trattner et al, 2018). Popular recipes on websites tend to be unhealthy (Trattner et al, 2017), which raises a challenge: how can AI present healthier content to users, while maintaining relevance?
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