Interactive recipe suggestions for diet and allergen management: utilizing llaMA with HEI and DQI for healthier eating

Abstract

Choosing daily meals can be a complex and overwhelming task, especially when considering nutritional requirements, ingredient availability, preparation time, cooking complexity, dietary restrictions, and allergens. Inadequate nutrition is linked to a variety of health problems, including cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and psychological disorders, highlighting the need for effective dietary management solutions. Existing machine learning approaches, such as food recommender systems, recipe generators, and recipe completion models, often focus on suggesting ingredients or generating recipes based on training data and with some ingredients to start from, but they typically do not address the challenge of creating complete daily meal plans that meet personalized nutritional needs. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Meta’s LLaMA, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini, offers a promising new avenue for enhancing personalized meal recommendations due to their accessibility and interactive capabilities. This thesis introduces a novel system that leverages LLaMA 3.1 combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide daily meal suggestions tailored to individual users’ nutritional profiles, dietary preferences, and allergen restrictions. Our system evaluates meal recommendations against established nutritional metrics such as the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) and Diet Quality Index (DQI) to ensure they align with dietary guidelines and promote healthy eating. Through the integration of LLaMA’s advanced language understanding and RAG’s contextual retrieval capabilities, the system delivers precise, personalized, and accessible meal recommendations, offering a practical tool for improving dietary management and supporting healthier eating habits. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in addressing the complexities of meal planning, making it a valuable resource for individuals seeking to optimize their dietary choices through informed and interactive guidance.