Nutrition counseling system and food menu planning

Abstract

In recent years the effects of industrial growth have resulted in drastic changes in consuming behavior, standard of living, and lifestyles. In particular there has been a significant rise in the number of people who eat out regularly. This often means that they cannot control the characteristics of the food they take, such as its taste, calories per portion, and other nutritional details. As a result they may become prone to obesity. Today people are confronted with more difficult decisions about how to select food items suitable for their nutritional needs. In this research, a nutrition counseling system (NCS) for food menu planning has been presented. This NCS not only assists in finding meals customized to each individual nutritional profile with an ability to propose menus for local Thai food dishes for the three meals in one day, but the system can also handle in case of feeding only breakfast as one meal and then two meals are automatically created. Moreover, although user has defined breakfast and lunch of that day, one more meal can be computed and proposed as dinner afterwards. In the near future such systems might become integral to an encompassing lifestyle health information system.