Here in the United States and around the world, when people have questions about health and wellness, nearly three-quarters of us turn to the Internet first. And in a country where one in two adults experiences diabetes or pre-diabetes and seven in 10 are overweight or obese, according to Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute, nutrition is increasingly taking center stage, and we’re relying on technology to help guide us.
This week I was in Washington DC attending FIMCON, a new national conference called “Food is Medicine.” I moderated a panel that looked at how digital platforms, behavioral science, and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be combined to communicate nutrition and health messages to the public. I spoke with experts including Nira Goren, MD, Google’s head of social health AI and Food is Medicine. Nousheen Hashemi, Founder and CEO of January AI. Sarah Mastrocco, Vice President and General Manager, Instacart Health.
I think it’s interesting that in recent years, society’s increasing awareness of the power of “Food is Medicine” has coincided with the boom in generative AI. To be honest, it excites me and makes me nervous at the same time. GenAI is a very powerful tool, but the great opportunities come with serious challenges in using it responsibly. That’s exactly why we need to talk about it.
According to research from Frontiers in Nutrition, AI can be used to provide personalized nutritional recommendations, enable early dietary intervention to prevent chronic diseases, and optimize food processing to reduce food waste. At the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, researchers are using a global database together with AI to map what they call the “dark matter” in food – the overwhelming majority of biomolecules in food that we don’t know about – to improve the health of humanity and the planet.
These potential impacts extend from your fork to our farm. This week, the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) held its annual Menus of Change summit, bringing together chefs, advocates, and private sector food leaders to discuss how the food system of the future, including health-oriented technologies like AI, starts in the kitchen.
And, as we reported on Food Tank, AI tools can also help farmers improve land management practices through precision agriculture. Analyze climate risks and predict disruption before it becomes catastrophic. Strengthen transparent and traceable supply chains.
But of course, there are no silver bullet technical solutions. In addition to having well-documented environmental impacts that cannot be ignored, generative AI resides in an overwhelming internet information ecosystem that is not necessarily accurate.
“Unfortunately, about 50% of online information about nutrition is disinformation,” Google’s Nira Goren told us at Food Tank’s SXSW Summit earlier this year. “So we wanted to help us become better at navigating that ocean of information, what is high quality, what is not high quality, why these two institutions are saying contradictory things.”
To address this, Google is working with the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute to ensure its tools and models are built on and provided with the best available public nutrition information.
And the public health situation has changed significantly in recent years. For example, the problem with obesity has only really become noticeable in recent decades, says cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Institute for Food is Medicine at Tufts University.
“I graduated from medical school in 1995. When we were talking about nutrition, we were talking about eating disorders. There was no obesity epidemic in 1995, so this has only happened in the last 30 years of our adult lives,” he says.
And economic risks are at an all-time high. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, in addition to the quality of life impacts of malnutrition, medical costs and lost productivity due to suboptimal diets cost the United States alone US$1.1 trillion in economic losses. So the cost of getting things wrong or doing nothing is huge.
There is no question that the food movement needs to ask serious questions about the future of generative AI. When it comes to protecting biodiversity, establishing food sovereignty, and even the idea that food is the first and best medicine, we often find very powerful answers in the indigenous wisdom that has guided humanity for thousands of years. As the climate crisis deepens, we cannot afford to make certain sacrifices, but we also cannot afford to leave the powerful tools on the table unused.
In other words, some new problems require new solutions. Investing in emerging technologies to strengthen our efforts to feed the planet can yield real results if we manage technology responsibly and center equity and justice in all decisions.
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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
