On the Relations Between Cooking Interests, Hobbies and Nutritional Values of Online Recipes: Implications for Health-Aware Recipe Recommender Systems

In this paper, we investigate differences between recipes uploaded by users and recipes bookmarked by users. The results indicate that uploaded recipes outperform bookmarked recipes in terms of healthiness. Further, health scores and nutritional values of these recipes are highly related to the stated cooking interests: for example, Southern Food lovers eat not as healthy as those who prefer the Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern cuisine. A disturbing finding is that interest in the category `Kids' is associated with bad values for all nutritional measures. We also found some interactions between hobbies such as biking, hunting or knitting and nutritional values. These insights pave way to the design of health-aware recipe recommender systems that take a user's food preferences into account; in addition, taking a user's lifestyle and hobbies into account would provide valuable input to persuasive systems.