Who consumes anthocyanins and anthocyanidins? Mining national retail data to reveal the influence of socioeconomic deprivation and seasonality on polyphenol dietary intake

Anthocyanins are a class of polyphenols that have received widespread recent attention due to their potential health benefits. However, estimating the dietary intake of anthocyanins at a population level is a challenging task, due to the difficulty of scaling dietary surveys. Further, there is limited evidence as to who regularly consumes anthocyanins, whether temporally, spatially, or culturally according to levels of socioeconomic deprivation. Leveraging a massive retail loyalty card dataset in the UK, we pair two years of real-world purchasing data for 619,524 regular shoppers and 207 million shopping baskets with anthocyanin estimates drawn from polyphenol databases. We subsequently analyse relative deprivation levels of the neighbourhoods in which shoppers reside, illustrating how anthocyanin intake varies according to affluence. Results indicate that deprivation is linked dramatically with both lower total intake of anthocyanins and lower breadth of dietary sources for them, potentially aggravating the incidence of diet-related diseases in the poorest sections of society.