An AI-driven multivariate approach for personalized healthy eating recommendations aligned with sustainable healthy diet food-group guidelines

Abstract

Translating nutritional recommendations into practical day-to-day meal choices remains a challenging task, particularly when personalization, nutritional adequacy, dietary diversity, allergies, seasonal availability, and food-group constraints must be simultaneously satisfied. This study presents and evaluates the PLAN'EAT Nutrition Advisor, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven, expert rule-based nutrition recommendation system, designed to generate personalized and nutritionally balanced weekly meal plans aligned with established dietary guidelines and food-group recommendations derived from Sustainable Healthy Diet (SHD) principles. The proposed approach is built upon the PLAN'EAT Expert-Curated Meal Database, a nutritionist-designed repository introduced in this work, comprising 401 expert-curated meals spanning Irish, Spanish, and Hungarian cuisines. Meal-plan generation follows a four-stage pipeline: (1) meal filtering based on country-specific cuisine, seasonality, dietary preferences, and allergies, (2) daily meal plan generation through large-scale sampling and scoring against expert-defined nutritional targets, (3) weekly meal plan assembly and optimization under nutritional and food-group constraints, and (4) diversity optimization to promote dietary variety while preserving nutritional validity. The proposed approach was validated through a large-scale in-silico validation involving 1,000 synthetic user profiles and the generation of 16,000 weekly meal plans corresponding to 112,000 daily meal plans. Adherence to daily and weekly nutritional targets, food-group constraints, and overall meal-plan validity at scale were assessed. In addition, we performed a preliminary descriptive evaluation against state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches under two complementary settings: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can efficiently generate personalized, nutritionally compliant, and diverse weekly meal plans while maintaining transparent expert-rule-driven optimization. Furthermore, the descriptive evaluation against LLM approaches suggests that the proposed system achieves more consistent energy and macronutrient adherence under the evaluated conditions.