Starbucks, which may hope its new calorie listings will create demand amongst the calorie conscious, should love graphs like this one from HitWise:
As you might expect, the chart shows an increase in online searches for “calories” and “diets” the first week in January, when resolutions are fresh.
You might think that an April spike in “calories” searches is simply a harbinger of bikini season — but there’s no correlating spike this time with “diets.”
Does this mean that people are becoming more calorically aware — or perhaps replacing their fad diets with monetary incentives?
(Hat tip: Bill Tancer)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Here’s a (much more readable, IMO) chart from Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=diets%2C+calories
It shows the same spikes, though the april spike seems much subtler.
I wonder. It’s not the spike that seems unique, but the gap in April-Sept 07 that closes again. It’s the only time that there’s a real separation between “calories” and “diets.”
What happened in April 07 that made people go looking into calories? Could that be when Bloomberg unveiled the calorie law in NYC?
I love the severe drop off of both searches in the November to December time frame. It certainly matches the behavior I see from my wife beginning at Thanksgiving and ending at Christmas.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=diet%2C+diets%2C+calories&ctab=0&geo=CA&geor=all&date=all&sort=0
This shows that most people just search for one diet at a time and that we’re not that ambitious after all.
Wow. The Google chart in post 1 looks like an EKG. The steady pulse-beat of our neuroses.
Maybe a lot of the gap between calories and diets is attributable to people not so much interested in dieting for weight loss, but in modifying their caloric intake to whip that ‘beach body’ into shape. E.g., people (largely males, not women as many of us would tend to think) who are interested in calories for muscle-building are not necessarily interested in dieting?
you have a point Mat. People go up and down dieting and watching calories and things stay the same. No change. So what if people were told and retold the truth about diet, exercise- has to be a way of life- not a momentary fad?
what would happen to the neurosis? Mine went away-
The results from the Facebook Lexicon (what people post publicly on Facebook walls) is interesting – they show the opposite. Big peak for “diet” in January, smaller one in April. No peak for “calories” in either time period, although there’s a big one last November.
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php?q=calories%2C diet