Mediterranean Diet Patterns in the Italian Population: A Functional Data Analysis of Google Trends

Internet search engines have become a popular and readily accessible source of information. Google Trends, by means of analyzing the popularity of search queries in Google Search, allows to provide deep insights into population behavior. Interestingly, Google is increasingly being used also to obtain health-related information, as well as to self-prescribe one’s dietary intake. In particular, we analysed the search traffic related to the keywords Mediterranean diet since it has always been very popular. More specifically, we propose to use Google Trends data as proxies for the interest in Mediterranean diet and to analyze them through the functional data analysis (FDA) approach.