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With rapid growth in unhealthy diet behaviors, implementing strategies that improve healthy eating is becoming increasingly important. One approach to improving diet behavior is to continuously monitor dietary intake (e.g., calorie intake) and provide educational, motivational, and dietary recommendation feedback. Although technologies based on wearable sensors, mobile applications, and light-weight cameras exist to gather diet-related information such as food type and eating time, there remains a gap in research on how to use such information to close the loop and provide feedback to the user to improve healthy diet. We address this knowledge gap by introducing a diet behavior change framework that generates real-time diet recommendations based on a user’s food intake and considering user’s deviation from the suggested diet routine. We formulate the problem of optimal diet recommendation as a sequential decision making problem and design a greedy algorithm that provides diet recommendations such that the amount of change in user’s dietary habits is minimized while ensuring that the user’s diet goal is achieved within a given time-frame. This novel approach is inspired by the Social Cognitive Theory, which emphasizes behavioral monitoring and small incremental goals as being important to behavior change. Our optimization algorithm integrates data from a user’s past dietary intake as well as the USDA nutrition dataset to identify optimal diet changes. We demonstrate the feasibility of our optimization algorithms for diet behavior change using real-data collected in two study cohorts with a combined N=10 healthy participants who recorded their diet for up to 21 days.
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Micronutrient Malnutrition – A Glimpse on the Current Strategies and Future Prospects
The inadequacy of micronutrients, namely essential vitamins and minerals in the human diet, manifests a wide range of moderate to serious health concerns collectively known as micronutrient malnutrition. It affects half of the global population, and food-based strategies such as balanced diet, supplementation and food fortification are effective. The balanced diet and dietary supplementation are desirable and sustainable; however, their efficacy is uncertain due to the required demands to improve dietary habits. Interestingly, food fortification – addition of micronutrients to processed foods - supplies micronutrients without the need to alter eating habits and unquestionably stands out as a systematic approach to moderate the statistical rise in micronutrient malnutrition. On the other hand, biofortification - plant breeding and/or genetic engineering - is a convenient and sustainable strategy with myriad possibilities to augment micronutrients status that could endure through generations. These approaches coupled with meticulously organized innovative policies and a competent food value chain will indeed aid in addressing the micronutrient deficiency toward building a productive and efficient generation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1849206
- PAR ID:
- 10335987
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Food Nutrition and Metabolism
- ISSN:
- 2674-2411
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.31487/j.JFNM.2021.02.02
