Perspective: A Framework for Addressing Dynamic Food Consumption Processes

Abstract

The study of food consumption, diet, and related concepts is motivated by diverse goals, including understanding why food consumption impacts our health, and why we eat the foods we do. These varied motivations can make it challenging to define and measure consumption, as it can be specified across nearly infinite dimensions-from micronutrients to carbon footprint to food preparation. This challenge is amplified by the dynamic nature of food consumption processes, with the underlying phenomena of interest often based on the nature of repeated interactions with food occurring over time. This complexity underscores a need to not only improve how we measure food consumption but is also a call to support theoreticians in better specifying what, how, and why food consumption occurs as part of processes, as a prerequisite step to rigorous measurement. The purpose of this Perspective article is to offer a framework, the consumption process framework, as a tool that researchers in a theoretician role can use to support these more robust definitions of consumption processes. In doing so, the framework invites theoreticians to be a bridge between practitioners who wish to measure various aspects of food consumption and methodologists who can develop measurement protocols and technologies that can support measurement when consumption processes are clearly defined. In the paper we justify the need for such a framework, introduce the consumption process framework, illustrate the framework via a use case, and discuss existing technologies that enable the use of this framework and, by extension, more rigorous study of consumption. This consumption process framework demonstrates how theoreticians could fundamentally shift how food consumption is defined and measured towards more rigorous study of what, how, and why food is eaten as part of dynamic processes and a deeper understanding of linkages between behavior, food, and health.

Keywords: diet; dietary assessment; dynamics; eating behavior; food consumption; food logging; food systems; precision health; precision nutrition; systems science.

FIGURE 1

The consumption process framework, and subsequent development of measurement protocols, illustrated as it applies to 3 audiences. Theoreticians are defined by their role in supporting clear specification of consumption processes, to serve as a bridge between the measurement needs expressed by practitioners (e.g., clinicians, behavioral interventionists) and the capacities of methodologists (including designers, engineers) to build measurement protocols and technologies. The double-diamond background is adopted from the UK Design Council (17) to illustrate how these audiences could work together—iteratively moving between discovering and defining consumption processes (first diamond, as focus of this paper) and developing and delivering measurement approaches based on those definitions (second diamond). In this way, conceptualizations of consumption processes inform measurement protocols and technologies, and those measurement approaches can then inform further discovery and (re)defining of process conceptualizations.

FIGURE 2

Co-interacting systems applied to a food consumption process. Using the example scenario for Roma of navigating food choices impacting gastrointestinal symptoms, this graphic illustrates how system boundaries and interactions are specified. The focal system is first identified based on the desired state that Roma is working towards, as process(es) in this context. Subsystems describe underlying mechanisms nested within that process, while surrounding and adjacent systems describe external influences that affect this process.

FIGURE 3

Dynamic qualities describing consumption processes over time. Dynamic qualities are illustrated individually on the left for continuity (does the change occur incrementally/gradually or discontinuously/abruptly?), regularity (does the frequency of change repeat in a predictable manner such as a cyclical pattern or in some sort of wave form?), and intensity (does the change vary in magnitude, for example “spiraling” such that there is an accelerating rate to a cyclical pattern?), and illustrations on the right show how these 3 qualities can be combined.

FIGURE 4

Example combinations of dimensions characterizing food consumption. Food consumption can be characterized across multiple dimensions, with the following graphics providing examples based on 4 dimensions considered in the paper: what and how foods are consumed, quantity and quality, relative and absolute, and social reality and physical reality.