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Young people who have AI meal plans might be consuming less calories, but missing a meal

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A large number of teenagers who have some weight problem are resorting to AI models as they seek to design meal plans in a bid to lose weight. A new study, however, indicates that the plans that are a result of this could not, at least in all cases, cover the required nutrients and calorie consumption.

In Turkey, five different AI models were compared in regard to their meal planning capabilities, which led researchers to develop meal plans to help teenagers lose weight and evaluated their findings against the recommendations of a registered dietician. They described their results in Frontiers in Nutrition.

According to Dr Ayse Betul Bilen, an assistant professor of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Istanbul Atlas University, there is a significant underestimation of total energy and the main nutrient intake of diet plans generated by AI models compared to plans prepared by a dietitian based on guidelines. It is known that adherence to this type of imbalanced or excessively restrictive meal plans in the teenage years can have a detrimental influence on growth, metabolic health, and eating habits.

Missing a meal

The researchers were prompted to generate meal plans using five AI models, which were ChatGPT 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Bing Chat-5GPT, Claude 4.1 and Perplexity, using free versions of these models. Some of the prompts were age, height and weight of the individual the plan would be based on, and the directive to develop a 3 days plan that included three meals and two snacks a day. Four teenagers aged 15 years, one boy and one girl, who were in the overweight percentile and one boy and one girl who fell in the obese percentile were put on meal plans.

Comparing the results of AIs to generate meal plans to those of a dietician who specializes in adolescent diseases, it was found that the energy requirement that was estimated by the AI models was on average nearly 700 calories lower than the dietitian. This is a full meal worth of difference that has severe clinical implications. The intake of some macronutrients had been overcalculated whereas the intake of some caloric nutrients was grossly undercalculated.

The AI-generated diet plans never adhered to the recommended mix of macronutrients, which is quite dangerous among adolescents, as Bilen indicated.

In comparison, AI models suggested more protein intake (20g higher than the dietician), and this scheme led to about 21-24% of the energy intake as protein. Recommendations of lipid provided by AI were also significantly more than in the plans developed by dieticians, and lipids constituted 41-45% of energy intake.

The quantity of carbohydrates, however, was much inferior in AI plans and the difference was about 115g on average, that is, only about 32-36 percent of the energy intake would be derived as carbs. In comparison, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and medicine in the US advise that the proportion of lipids, proteins and carbs should be 30-35, 15-20 and 45-50 percent respectively.

Favoring plans to balanced diets

Although numerous pieces of information about healthy diet guidelines are found on national and international health organizations websites, such as the Turkish Nutritional Guidelines or WHO Adolescent Nutritional Guidelines, AI tools do not necessarily use evidence-based nutritional guidelines in their production. Bilen stated that AI models are mostly trained to produce answers that are most plausible and user-friendly, and not necessarily accurate, clinically. According to their findings, they might be dependent on generalized or popular diet patterns rather than incorporating the nutritional requirements of age.

Since not every teenager can hire the service of a dietician to help them plan their meals, the team recommended that a person using AI tools to create a diet plan should be cautious. The teenagers are also to remember that the diets that are too restrictive or that are constructed on the basis of extreme diets that are based on the dominance of either protein or fat.

The researchers claimed that they hope that their findings will contribute to the increased awareness of the narrow capability of AI tools to create well-balanced meal plans and assist in developing safer tools that are more consistent with the guidelines created by professionals. Although AI models are fast developing and models might be better now than they were at the time of analysis, AI models are not an alternative to professional dietary counseling especially to the vulnerable groups.

Bilen concluded that adolescence is a critical period with regard to physical development, bone development and cognitive maturation. The risks of a lower energy and carbohydrate intake and higher ratios of protein and fat could be dangerous at the adolescent growth stage.

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Eating protein three times a day could make our seniors stronger

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Loss of muscle is an inevitable consequence of aging that can lead to frailty, falls or mobility problems. Eating enough protein is one way to remedy it, but it would seem that spreading protein equally among the three daily meals could be linked to greater mass and muscle strength in the elderly. These are the findings of a study conducted at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in collaboration with the Université de Sherbrooke and the Université de Montréal. The research team examined both the amount of protein consumed and its distribution among people aged 67 and over, using one of the most comprehensive cohort studies in Quebec.

The results of the study, which were published recently in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, shed new light on the diet of people in an aging population.

“Many seniors, especially in North America, consume the majority of their daily protein intake at lunch and dinner. We wanted to see if people who added protein sources to breakfast, and therefore had balanced protein intake through the three meals, had greater muscle strength,” says the lead author of the study, Dr. Stéphanie Chevalier, who is a scientist with the Metabolic Disorders and Complications Program at the RI-MUHC and an assistant professor at the School of Human Nutrition at McGill University.

A rich database of nutrition data

To achieve these results, Dr. Chevalier and her team collaborated with the Université de Sherbrooke and used the database from the Quebec longitudinal study on nutrition and aging called NuAge (Nutrition as a Determinant of Successful Aging).

RI-MUHC researchers analyzed data from the NuAge cohort, which included nearly 1,800 people who were followed for three years. They reviewed the protein consumption patterns of 827 healthy men and 914 healthy women aged 67 to 84 years, all residents of Quebec, trying to establish links with variables such as strength, muscle mass or mobility.

“The NuAge study is one of the few studies gathering such detailed data on food consumption among a large cohort of elderly people. We are proud that the NuAge study can contribute to relevant research of this magnitude in Quebec,” says study co-author Dr. Hélène Payette of the Centre for Research on Aging and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke.

“We observed that participants of both sexes who consumed protein in a balanced way during the day had more muscle strength than those who consumed more during the evening meal and less at breakfast. However, the distribution of protein throughout the day was not associated with their mobility,” explains the first author of the study, Dr. Samaneh Farsijani, a former PhD student at the RI-MUHC supervised by Dr. Chevalier.

A “boost” of amino acids

All body tissues, including the muscles, are composed of proteins, which consist of amino acids. If the protein intake decreases, the synthesis is not done correctly and this leads to a loss of muscle mass.

“Our research is based on scientific evidence demonstrating that older people need to consume more protein per meal because they need a greater boost of amino acids for protein synthesis,” says Dr. Chevalier, adding that one of the essential amino acids known for protein renewal is leucine. “It would be interesting to look into protein sources and their amino acid composition in future studies to further our observations.”