SWITCHtoHEALTHY AI-Based Family Nutrition Recommendation System: Promoting the Mediterranean Diet

Background/Objectives: Modern families face challenges in maintaining healthy and sustainable diets due to time constraints and busy lifestyles. The Mediterranean diet (MD), known for its benefits to both personal health and environmental sustainability, is often difficult to apply consistently within households. This paper presents and validates the SWITCHtoHEALTHY AI-based Family Nutrition Recommendation System, designed to generate meal plans aligned with MD guidelines. Methods: Two complementary recommendation engines were developed: the AI-based Family Nutritional Recommender, which creates personalized meal plans for adults that include shared family meals, and the Child Nutritional Recommender, which generates meal plans for children that could also incorporate school menus or proposals from the school cafeteria. Both systems rely on an expert-validated dataset of Mediterranean foods and are designed to comply with the expert-validated nutritional rules based on MD principals and national dietary guidelines. Results: The recommendation systems were validated using data from a real-world family intervention, achieving 90% accuracy in generating meal plans for all family members, while meeting the expert validated dietary rules for both adults and children. Moreover, AI-based Family Nutritional Recommender exceeds 90% accuracy in estimating calorie and nutrient content for adults. Conclusions: The results demonstrate the preliminary potential of AI-based recommendation systems to facilitate healthier and more sustainable dietary habits within modern households by generating personalized, nutritionally balanced family meal plans consistent with MD principles.