Estimating nutrient content variety from food imports data

Abstract

Studying food consumption trends provides insight on potential health effects from changes to nutrient intake. Here, we evaluate nutrient content variety of generated plates using distributions from the 2014 Philippines food imports. We describe these differences using entropy on the unusual metric of reference daily intake value averaged over nutrients (α_N). Cheaper plates have a wide spread of possible entropy values but low α_N values while more expensive plates have a smaller range of possible entropy values with higher α_N values. We show that lower budget not only restricts possible purchasable items, but also results in plates with lower nutrient content and uneven nutrition distribution.