Promoting Tasty Meals to Support Healthful Eating

The World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted significant future health problems stemming from inappropriate eating habits in Europe and other Western countries [8]. Moreover, these issues also start to arise in the developing countries, for example, China’s official nutrition and health survey showed that between 1992 and 2002 more than 60 million people became obese. Although consumers are in general aware of improper eating habits, they often do not comply with corresponding behaviors. Food choice is influenced by many factors [8, 3], however a fundamental barrier to achieving a healthy diet is the inability or lack of confidence to plan and prepare healthy foods [5]. As people combine work, family social life, they demand nutritious and palatable meals, but without being able to devote much time on food planning and preparation. Given these considerations, it is not surprising that the average home cook, the nutritional gatekeeper of the family, generally selects meals and ingredients with limited variation. In this note, we target the mentioned barrier by introducing a system for the personalized recommendation of food recipes. By offering personalized meal suggestions, actionable meal advice is given to the user and awareness of better meal choices is being created. As the recommendations are aimed to be close to the user’s eating habits, the objective is to improve the nutritional intake of the user’s household in a sustainable manner. The recipe advice system targets consumers who are motivated to change their meal selections, but face the barriers mentioned above.