Pass me the pastries, please

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - A new global study by researchers from EPFL, the University of Fribourg, and Microsoft Research has found there was an overall surge in high calorie foods such as pastries, bread and pies during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with potential implications for public health. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered people's lives around the world. By mid-May 2020, 2.5 billion people or more than one-third of the global population, had been asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments to prevent the spread of the deadly virus. New joint research published today Communications, led by the Data Science Laboratory in EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences , together with collaborators from Microsoft Research and the University of Fribourg, shows us just what we were doing during COVID-19-s first wave when we were confined in our houses - dreaming about, and likely eating, high calorie comfort food. As diets were suspected to have become less balanced during the first COVID-19 lockdowns, with potentially important ramifications for public health, the researchers leveraged passively collected large-scale digital trace data to analyze changes in food-related interests across eighteen countries. Specifically, they captured the popularity of Google search queries related to almost 1500 foods (e.g., bread, pizza, pies) as well as ways of accessing food (e.g., restaurant, recipe) obtained in an aggregated form via the Google Trends tool, to analyze changes in food-related interests.