The effects of food and drink intake to driving performance: a systematic review

Human-related factors are considered to be the main cause of traffic incidents or accidents, causing 69.70% of the incidents. Several studies have been conducted to identify the relationship between drowsiness or fatigue and driving performance. Furthermore, a number of other studies not only discussed the symptoms causing drowsiness but also tried to investigate related factors that cause sleepiness or fatigue while driving. On the other hand, some discussed the quantity and quality of sleep as well as food and drink intake before and while driving. This systematic review, which is based on the PRISMA method, aims to map previous studies that investigated the effect of different food/drink consumption, either taken prior to driving or while driving, on the on-road driving characteristics of drivers. Furthermore, this article is expected to serve as a reference for further research that could potentially contribute to minimizing driving errors that lead to incident or accident. From 1871 articles screened, 7 studies related to food/drink intake and driving performance were reviewed. On the basis of the existing studies, no real evidence showing the presence of the association between food intake and the monotony of the road to decrease the driving performance has been found; therefore, further research is needed.