6 Ways to Use ChatGPT to Improve Your Diet

ChatGPT can seem like it has endless uses for the curious consumer. Users can query the model and return aggregations of troves of published information in seconds. For all health matters, we recommend speaking to a doctor directly about your concerns. However, ChatGPT can help you figure out a good place to start with improving your diet while you wait to see a registered dietitian. Users can expect relatively good advice with comprehensive explanations that make it easy to make plans for improving your diet. However, it’s crucial to remember that ChatGPT isn’t always accurate. Using it as a jumping-off point to learn more about topics and further your personal research can be a good use of it, but blindly believing everything it prints on the screen is a recipe for disaster.

To figure out what belonged on this list, we started by looking at important questions that dietitians ask about a person’s diet. This helped us understand what questions people should be asking about their own diets to improve them. Then, we started crafting and trying prompts in ChatGPT to see how the language model handled different prompts. We cross-referenced information to ensure its overall accuracy and rewrote the prompts if they returned inaccurate, incomplete, or unsatisfactory results.

Prompting ChatGPT to Tell You What Your Diet Needs

The first step to figuring out your healthy diet journey is to determine what your diet needs to look like. Tell ChatGPT the basics of what needs to be said to determine information like your basal metabolic rate (height, weight, and age), any food allergies you have, and any additional dietary restrictions, such as if you follow a vegetarian, vegan, plant-based, kosher, or halal diet. ChatGPT will then analyze your dietary needs, restrictions, and basal metabolic rate.

We had a good experience with getting accurate and helpful information on a context-heavy prompt. The less context is given to the AI for this prompt, the less helpful the information will be. Remember that large language models don’t judge you for your lifestyle or weight. So, be honest. We started with “What does a healthy diet look like?” Then, from there we slowly amended the prompt until it returned the information we were looking for.

The best version we got was with “I’m [age] years old, [height], and weigh [weight] pounds. I’m also [diet restrictions, if necessary. If you have no diet restrictions, leave this sentence out entirely.] How can I structure my diet in a way that I can maintain a calorie deficit while eating healthy?” Then, for posterity’s sake, I had ChatGPT regenerate the prompt and factor in that I eat a lot of white rice and am unwilling to give that little cultural pleasure up into the prompt.

Having ChatGPT Identify the Best Nutrient Sources for Your Diet

Another thing you can have ChatGPT help you with is identifying good nutrient sources for your dietary needs. Diet is a very unique and personal situation. So, it’s important to understand what your best options are within your personal preferences and restrictions. Doing so can help you maintain a healthy diet while enjoying the things you love the most.

As a vegan, I’m conscious of the concentrations of protein, collagen, vitamins, and minerals in my food. Everyone should be conscious of the vitamins and minerals they’re getting, but protein and collagen can be hard to get as a vegan unless you’re conscious of what you’re eating. So, I tested ChatGPT’s ability to find the best sources of protein and collagen support for vegans. I queried “What are the best sources of collagen and protein for vegans?” and the AI returned a comprehensive list of common sources of protein, collagen support vitamins and minerals.

Asking ChatGPT for Supplemental Nutrient Recommendations

You can also put in your primary food sources and have ChatGPT recommend additional sources of nutrients that you might be missing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my diet is pretty well-balanced, according to ChatGPT. However, the AI did mention some vitamins and minerals that were not present in the foods I eat most commonly, as well as food sources that contain those compounds that I’m missing.

For this prompt, you’ll want to be as detailed as possible without overloading the AI. Too much context and the point might get lost; not enough and you’ll end up with a list of food you already eat. Choose the primary food sources in your diet and list them for the AI. The list can be as long or as short as you want it to be; just remember that the amount of context you give the model will determine the quality of its answer. For this, I said “I primarily eat [list of foods; there were about twenty on my list]. What foods can I add to my vegan diet to supplement the nutrients I’m missing?” Some groups primarily listed foods I had already mentioned, but overall, the results were very good.

Asking ChatGPT to Help You Build a Meal Plan

Meal planning is an excellent way to improve your health and ensure that you eat enough without overeating. By planning out your meals and portioning them in advance, you can ensure that you get all of your necessary nutrients, hit your protein goals, and stay within your caloric needs. It also helps you cut down on food prep time since your meals are premade and proportioned. All you have to do is heat them!

Getting ChatGPT to build you a meal plan is pretty easy, but for best results, you want a context-heavy prompt. Be forthcoming about what you do and don’t like and any dietary restrictions you need to keep in mind. If there’s anything you specifically want to include or not include, make sure you state that clearly. Additionally, you can amend the prompt to include nutrient goals and profiles that you want to emphasize in your diet. A prompt like “Build me a seven-day vegan meal plan that includes white rice and gets me 160 grams of protein per day” will yield good results tailored to your needs.

Getting New Recipes via ChatGPT

Another excellent way to use ChatGPT to improve your diet is to use it to find new recipes. People can sometimes find that foods they thought they didn’t like were just prepared in a way that didn’t resonate with their taste buds. Alternatively, maybe someone out there has been eating the same chicken recipe their whole life and they’ve decided to shake it up a bit. Either way, searching through a hundred recipes is a daunting idea and you might not even find the one you want. So, let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting for you.

For our specific testing, we looked for recipes with different quantifiers and restrictions. Giving the AI enough context to provide you with comprehensive guides that are still automatically tailored to your specific needs will net you the best immediate results. For instance, “Generate vegan recipes to help me incorporate chia seeds into my diet” would be good. However, more context regarding what kind of recipes you want will give you better results. We also had good results when using longer, more conversational prompts like, “I’ve never had spinach before and want to make sure I like it. I enjoy spicy food and rich, savory food and detest sweet food. What spices should I add to my spinach that pair well with it while still being within a flavor I tend to enjoy?” This gave a lot of good recipes that were specific to the personal tastes attested to in the prompt.

Using ChatGPT to Find Alternatives for Foods You Want to Phase Out of Your Diet

Phasing comfort foods out of your diet can be easier if you replace them with similar items or alter the recipe to be healthier. This is another place where ChatGPT can do a lot of heavy lifting and help you sift through information, aggregating it for ease of perusal.

For this, we searched for two different types of replacement. First, we looked at healthy alternatives to mac and cheese with the prompt, “I eat a lot of mac and cheese and want to find something that is similar to eat but healthier. What are my options for replacing mac and cheese or altering the recipe to make it healthier?” Then, we tried a strict recipe replacement and looked for alternatives to eggs to use in baking with the query, “I like to bake but I’m vegan and need good egg alternatives for baking.” Both prompts returned accurate and comprehensive information that we could easily use for these purposes.

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