How To Use AI for Diet and Nutrition: Benefits, Risks and Better Prompts

You’re hungry. You have no idea what to cook, and no inspiration. Who you gonna call? Increasingly, the answer is AI. An AI chatbot will tell you what to do with those leftovers, but therein lies the catch. Chatbots will give you an answer, and quickly, but will it be a good one? That depends on you.

How Do AI Chatbots Help with Meal Planning and Nutrition?

Need a gluten-free diet for a specific number of days? Or how about dishes with particular types of carbs? Maybe you’ve got a picture of your meal and want to know if what’s on the plate meets your goals. AI can help with all of this — even with a meal in front of you, AI’s response might give you an “Oh!” moment, so you make a different choice the next time or decide not to finish the whole plate.

Remember, though, that a bot is making assumptions. What’s in that brown sauce in your photo? Who knows! So you still need information from real-world sources like the restaurant kitchen or the USDA. Data is good, but it’s not all created equal.

The Limitations of Personalized AI Nutrition Advice

To get the most out of AI’s ability to personalize nutrition, you need to know yourself. That’s hard, and takes practice. Registered dietitians get to know a patient and then give individual recommendations; that’s what they’re licensed to do. AI can give you information, but it may not be information that’s pertinent to you.

Another thing to consider: Personalized nutrition is based on confidential data such as genetics testing and disease diagnoses. Nutrigenomics purports to tell you what nutrients you, specifically, need to consume to feel your best, but are you comfortable feeding lots of highly personal data into a bot?

Dietitians may use AI too, to create or refine diets for patients, right down to number of calories, grams of nutrients, allergy concerns and more. But your dietitian knows you and can come up with a plan that takes into account your likes and dislikes. A plan that meets numeric goals but is nonsensical or wildly unbalanced isn’t going to be easy to follow and won’t improve your nutrition.

Is It Safe To Follow Dietary Advice from AI?

Large language model computers — what we call AI — are revolutionizing computing largely because their interface — the bot — seems so much like us. It’s easy to imagine that you have a connection, and that the bot understands you.

What the interface really does is make it easier and more comfortable to get detailed information in a way that humans find pleasant and digestible. That’s a good thing — as long as you are getting answers truly relevant to you, and you can safely act on the information.

An example: Bezoars — essentially an undigested mass in the gut that can cause intestinal blockage — have turned up recently in patients who sought AI advice on fiber. The bots suggested chia seeds, but at an extraordinary amount, and didn’t add that the human needed to drink much more water along with the seeds. The answer the chat bot gave did indeed meet goals, but also was potentially harmful. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s OK — just remember the bot doesn’t either. A dietitian is much more likely to share all of the info you need to know when changing your eating plan.

Best Ways To Use AI for Grocery Shopping and Cooking

Humans feel vulnerable about what they don’t know, and that can include things like how to cook or even how to grocery shop. AI is great for this, as long as you give it a thoughtful and specific prompt. Shopping on your own for the first time, maybe with a limited budget? AI can give you multiple ideas for meals you can afford that meet your nutrient goals, and instructions on how to prepare them. For someone not sure where to start, this is a great tool, and it doesn’t judge you. Just don’t forget about the prompt: If, say, you fail to mention you are a vegetarian, you’re going to get a lot of suggestions that don’t work for you.

Let’s say you’re shopping for supplements. Perhaps you need more iron in your diet — for women, those needs vary widely across their lifetimes, from menstruation to pregnancy to menopause. So you have to give the bot that kind of info too. Remember that the chatbot may not distinguish between supplements that have reliable -third-party testing and those that don’t, and it might not flag supplements that are not recommended based on your history or medications.

Why AI Cannot Replace a Registered Dietitian

Dietitians know, for most people, improving their nutrition isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s a behavior problem. Most people have a pretty good idea what they should be eating; it’s forming those habits that is challenging.

One way AI can help with this: Ask it all the questions you can and use the answers as a tool to guide a conversation with a trusted medical provider at your next appointment.

This content is not AI generated.