Research from the University of Sussex, published in the Journal of Translational Medicine, took anonymised information on the food preferences of 180,000 volunteers within the UK Biobank and used artificial intelligence to group them into three general profiles: Health-conscious, Omnivore and Sweet tooth.
Professor Nophar Geifman, senior author of the study and Professor of Health and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Surrey, said:
“The foods that you like or dislike seem to directly link to your health. If your favourite foods are cakes, sweets, and sugary drinks, then our study’s results suggest that this may have negative effects on your health. We found that the sweet tooth group are 31% more likely to have depression. We also found that the sweet tooth group had higher rates of diabetes, as well as vascular heart conditions, compared to the other two groups.
“Importantly, by using data-driven Artificial Intelligence methods, we were able to identify groups of people defined by their food preferences, and these groups are meaningful in that they are linked to health outcomes as well as biological markers.”
View: https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-024-05663-0