Subjective Evaluation of Food: A Japanese Database

How much do you like a particular food? How tasty does it look? Does it seem healthy? Such subjective evaluations of foods guide our dietary choices. Maladaptive food evaluations are often linked to the development of obesity. In this study, we introduce a dataset of food evaluations that includes ratings of 896 food images, assessed in terms of likability, tastiness, and healthiness, from 199 online participants. Our pilot analysis demonstrated that obese and lean participants exhibited largely similar patterns in their food evaluations, with some minor differences. Furthermore, self-reported questionnaire data showed that obese participants reported higher degrees of picky eating and difficulty with eating compared with lean participants, whereas their overall mental-health status did not differ. We believe this dataset will prove valuable for future studies exploring individual differences in food evaluations.