Assessing the external household exposome from consumer purchases: The My Purchases cohort

Abstract

Background: Consumer Purchase Data (CPD) has emerged as a promising instrument to assess the impact of purchases on health. Here we describe a comprehensive prospective collection of CPD, the My Purchases cohort. The cohort included 428 participants as of April 18, 2023. Over eight years of CPD collected, 2,058,689 products were purchased, comprising 210,203 unique products. We matched 87.7% of all products by volume with nutrients, ingredients, or additives from at least one database. We found a median rate difference of 0.26 when we compared kilojoule information from generic and specific product matches. Further, increasing the number of retailers that provide CPD improved the stability of individual CPD profiles. Combined with extensive product databases and access to key health outcomes, CPD could approach a “consumerome” that could provide the basis for extensive investigations of how what we buy affects our health.

Overweight in childhood and consumer purchases in a Danish cohort

“…The 487,340 unique product names were mapped to a food composition database [ 21 ] through regular expressions which allowed for categorization into 27 food groups. This mapping process and a list of foods and food groups have been described in more detail elsewhere [ 22 , 23 ]. Only expenditures on edible goods were included in the analysis, and information on discounts was excluded due to uncertainty about which goods it applied to.…”