A system for supporting dietary habits: planning menus and visualizing nutritional intake balance

An adequate diet is essential to maintaining one's health. It is also important to identify potential nutritional problems in improving one's diet. As an aid to achieving these objectives, we propose a system that helps users plan nutritionally balanced menus and visualize their dietary habits. To model the nutritional intake balance, we use a standard intake for each food group. In our system, cooking recipes for over 12000 dishes are indexed and the ingredients for each dish are classified into food groups. A user supplies information about the dishes already eaten, and the system automatically calculates and records the intake for each food group. For those wishing to prepare a meal themselves, our system presents recipes for dishes matching queries. To help users plan menus, our system can also present combinations of dishes that maintain the nutritional balance as far as possible. To review dietary habits, a user can view the imbalance between the standard and actual intakes over a specific period. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system by experiments using human subjects.