From Neural Networks To Nutrition: Using AI To Get Fit (Part 2/3)

Welcome to this week’s Deep-Fried Dive with Fry Guy! In these long-form articles, Fry Guy conducts in-depth analyses of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) developments and developers. Today, Fry Guy dives into AI’s ability to serve as a personal nutritionist. We hope you enjoy!

*Notice: We do not receive any monetary compensation from the people and projects we feature in the Sunday Deep-Fried Dives with Fry Guy. We explore these projects and developers solely to showcase interesting and cutting-edge AI developments and uses.*

Want to get healthy?

Forget about the $199/month infomercial on the TV, and stop searching the web for conflicting and impersonal answers about what you should or shouldn’t eat!

As AI continues to improve, resources are emerging left and right that can help people improve and monitor their health. In this three-part series, we have been exploring some of these tools and gadgets—ones that are helping people design workout schedules, optimize their nutrition, and monitor their overall health. Today, let’s up our nutrition game!

AI’S NUTRITION EXPERTISE

Have you ever tried to go on a diet or monitor your nutritional intake? With all the nutritional advice that floods the internet, it can be incredibly hard to determine which foods are good for you and which aren’t. Oftentimes, when searching the web, we can discover contradictory perspectives. One expert might say that blueberries are a superfood, for instance, while another says they can be bad for you. It can also be difficult to determine how much you should eat and when. Some people say intermittent fasting can help prevent cancer and promote weight loss while others say it can raise your chances of cardiovascular death. How could one person possibly sort all of this out? Well, AI is here to help (at least a little).

Developers have been training AI tools of all kinds on tons of data to figure out the most optimal nutrition plans for individuals. Whether these plans are actually effective or not is a question we will set aside. But regardless, many of these AI tools can generate informative nutrition plans for individuals, and people have found success using them.

Some of the AI nutrition planning tools are simple and easy to use, while others are more advanced. Remember our friends from Easy-Peasy in Part 1? They also have a free Meal Plan Generator. It’s not meant for those looking for an in-depth nutrition plan, but it can generate a basic, general guide for what to eat. This is good enough for some people.

When you enter the Meal Plan Generator platform, you will be prompted to fill out a simple form. The form will include questions such as your dietary preferences, meal frequency, calorie goal, and dietary restrictions.

After filling out this simple form, the Meal Plan Generator will create a basic nutrition plan, personalized for you. The plan will include a full day of detailed meals and suggested snacks. It will tell you exactly what foods you need to eat to hit your nutrition goals. Additionally, it will suggest tips for your diet, including things like how much water you should be drinking each day and which foods you might swap or incorporate in for others based on how available they are to you. Easy-Peasy AI’s Meal Plan Generator allows users to create up to 4 daily meal plan suggestions every 24 hours for free and more with a subscription.

Although Easy-Peasy’s Meal Plan Generator is free and easy to use, some people want more than a simple list of what they should eat for each meal of the day. If you want to truly take your nutrition game to the next level, you might want to consider some more advanced tools, such as NutritionAI, MealMate, MyChefAI, and more. One of the coolest, advanced nutrition tools we have found is MyNetDiary. MyNetDairy is available as a mobile app, and it was regarded as the #1 diet app in a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

MyNetDiary boasts many capabilities, but at its core, it creates and tracks diets for users. It begins by asking users basic questions about their height, weight, age, gender, lifestyle, and more. It then asks users to input goals—such as how much weight they would like to lose—and asks for a goal date. For instance, it may help the user to create the goal that they will lose 15 pounds in the next 90 days. The user can also include more specific things like how many vitamins they want to incorporate into their diet. From this information, MyNetDiary will calculate exactly what macronutrients the user should intake each day. It will optimize potential dietary plans and offer options for the user to choose from, outlining exactly how much protein, carbs, fat, etc. one should intake each day to reach their goals. This plan can be customized according to an individual’s schedule, allowing users to eat more every other day, for instance.

The cool thing about MyNetDiary is that it not only helps users create dietary plans—it also helps users monitor their diets and see how close they are to achieving their daily, weekly, and monthly goals. This feature isn’t anything entirely new to nutrition tracking, as many apps, such as MyFitnessPal, have helped users track their caloric intake and macros for years. However, in order to log a meal, many of those apps require users to search for food manually. MyNetDiary uses AI search and computer vision to make this process easier. MyNetDiary does not require users to pull out their food labels and manually enter all the nutrients from their food items. It also does not require users to search through a database to find all the food they ate. Rather, users can simply chat with an AI chatbot in natural language, saying something like, “I ate 8oz of salmon and half a cup of mashed potatoes.” From there, the app will process the nutrients in that food and store it on the user’s log. A new feature called Meal Scan makes this process even easier, allowing users to simply scan the barcode of their food or take a picture of it. Through image recognition, the app can recognize the food on someone’s plate and log the nutrients for them. And let’s be honest: most people are taking pictures of all their food anyways!

Beyond logging food, MyNetDiary can track things like one’s hunger. Users can journal throughout the day how hungry they are and at what times. The app will make calculated suggestions based off how one feels throughout the day and week to help one optimize their lifestyle and food intake. The app can also track things like medication intake and suggest diets based on things like diabetes or high cholesterol.

WHO’S GOING TO DO THE COOKING?

Having a meal plan is great, but what about the cooking? One of the hardest parts of following a diet is gathering the right ingredients and doing the prep work! After all, who has time to come up with the perfect recipes for every meal? Well, AI may be able to help in this regard.

Do you know what you want to make, but don’t know how to make it?

An AI tool called DishGen can help you with this situation. All you have to do is type in what you would like to make, and in seconds, the AI tool will spit out a detailed list of the ingredients you need and the steps for cooking the dish.

Do you have no idea what to make?

Getting to the grocery store to buy ingredients is super time consuming, and unless you plan ahead, it is unlikely you will have all the ingredients you need to make extravagant dishes. So what can you do? There are actually AI tools available that can use your existing ingredients to make creative meals. For instance, Omlete and SuperCook are tools that allow users to input ingredients they have in their kitchen. From there, the underlying algorithms can design a recipe based on only those ingredients. This means you don’t have to run to the store in order to cook up a meal—the AI will put something creative together for you.

A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT NUTRITION

The future of nutrition isn’t just about counting calories or debating the latest diet trends. As we have seen, it may also involve using AI to make smarter, more personalized choices. Whether you want a meal plan generated in seconds, an AI assistant to track your macros, or a tool that turns random pantry ingredients into a gourmet meal, the tech is already here. But at the end of the day, AI is just that—an assistant, not a substitute for thoughtful eating and mindful health decisions. It’s not there as the final word or meant to stop you from enjoying the delicacies you love. After all, sometimes it’s worth indulging on that extra handful of French fries.

Working out (Part 1) and Nutrition (Part 2) are a big part of getting fit! However, monitoring your health is also important. Next week, in Part 3/3, we will explore some cutting-edge AI gadgets that are helping people monitor their health. Until then, eat your spinach!