Measuring and shaping the nutritional environment via food sales logs: case studies of campus-wide food choice and a call to action.

Although diets influence health and the environment, measuring and changing nutrition is challenging. Traditional measurement methods face challenges, and designing and conducting behavior-changing interventions is conceptually and logistically complicated. Situated local communities such as university campuses offer unique opportunities to shape the nutritional environment and promote health and sustainability. The present study investigates how passively sensed food purchase logs typically collected as part of regular business operations can be used to monitor and measure on-campus food consumption and understand food choice determinants. First, based on 38 million sales logs collected on a large university campus over eight years, we perform statistical analyses to quantify spatio-temporal determinants of food choice and characterize harmful patterns in dietary behaviors, in a case study of food purchasing at EPFL campus. We identify spatial proximity, food item pairing, and academic schedules (yearly and daily) as important determinants driving the on-campus food choice. The case studies demonstrate the potential of food sales logs for measuring nutrition and highlight the breadth and depth of future possibilities to study individual food-choice determinants. We describe how these insights provide an opportunity for stakeholders, such as campus offices responsible for managing food services, to shape the nutritional environment and improve health and sustainability by designing policies and behavioral interventions. Finally, based on the insights derived through the case study of food purchases at EPFL campus, we identify five future opportunities and offer a call to action for the nutrition research community to contribute to ensuring the health and sustainability of on-campus populations-the very communities to which many researchers belong.

Revealed versus potential spatial accessibility of healthcare and changing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Timely access to healthcare is essential but measuring access is challenging. Prior research focused on analyzing potential travel times to healthcare under optimal mobility scenarios that do not incorporate direct observations of human mobility, potentially underestimating the barriers to receiving care for many populations. METHODS: We introduce an approach for measuring accessibility by utilizing travel times to healthcare facilities from aggregated and anonymized smartphone Location History data. We measure these revealed travel times to healthcare facilities in over 100 countries and juxtapose our findings with potential (optimal) travel times estimated using Google Maps directions. We then quantify changes in revealed accessibility associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. RESULTS: We find that revealed travel time differs substantially from potential travel time; in all but 4 countries this difference exceeds 30 minutes, and in 49 countries it exceeds 60 minutes. Substantial variation in revealed healthcare accessibility is observed and correlates with life expectancy (⍴=-0.70) and infant mortality (⍴=0.59), with this association remaining significant after adjusting for potential accessibility and wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic altered the patterns of healthcare access, especially for populations dependent on public transportation. CONCLUSIONS: Our metrics based on empirical data indicate that revealed travel times exceed potential travel times in many regions. During COVID-19, inequitable accessibility was exacerbated. In conjunction with other relevant data, these findings provide a resource to help public health policymakers identify underserved populations and promote health equity by formulating policies and directing resources towards areas and populations most in need.

Spatial access to healthcare facilities (i.e., how long people need to travel to reach care) is important for understanding public health, but hard to measure. Most research so far has focused on theoretical (potential) travel times. Using anonymized smartphone location history data, we measure actual (revealed) travel times to healthcare facilities in over 100 countries. We find that revealed travel times exceed theoretical travel times in many regions of the world, meaning that in reality people travel longer to get healthcare. Our data also show that inequities in travel time became worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. When combined with other data, these results can help policymakers identify areas and populations at need, and direct resources to improve public health.

Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report).

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report, we study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy.com comparing multiple headline variants for the same news articles. This unique setup allows us to control for factors that could otherwise have important confounding effects on headline success. Based on the prior literature and an exploratory portion of the data, we formulated hypotheses about the linguistic features associated with statistically superior headlines, previously published as a registered report protocol. Here, we report the findings based on a much larger portion of the data that became available after the publication of our registered report protocol. Our registered findings contribute to resolving competing hypotheses about the linguistic features that affect the success of text and provide avenues for research into the psychological mechanisms that are activated by those features.

Population-scale dietary interests during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has altered people's lives around the world. Here we document population-wide shifts in dietary interests in 18 countries in 2020, as revealed through time series of Google search volumes. We find that during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic there was an overall surge in food interest, larger and longer-lasting than the surge during typical end-of-year holidays in Western countries. The shock of decreased mobility manifested as a drastic increase in interest in consuming food at home and a corresponding decrease in consuming food outside of home. The largest (up to threefold) increases occurred for calorie-dense carbohydrate-based foods such as pastries, bakery products, bread, and pies. The observed shifts in dietary interests have the potential to globally affect food consumption and health outcomes. These findings can inform governmental and organizational decisions regarding measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on diet and nutrition.

Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report Protocol).

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report protocol, we propose to study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy comparing multiple headline variants for the same news articles. This unique setup allows us to control for factors that can have crucial confounding effects on headline success. Based on prior literature and a pilot partition of the data, we formulate hypotheses about the linguistic features that are associated with statistically superior headlines. We will test our hypotheses on a much larger partition of the data that will become available after the publication of this registered report protocol. Our results will contribute to resolving competing hypotheses about the linguistic features that affect the success of text and will provide avenues for research into the psychological mechanisms that are activated by those features.