arXiv · 2407.12843
NutriBench: A Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models on Nutrition Estimation from Meal Descriptions
Abstract
Accurate nutrition estimation helps people make informed dietary choices and is essential in the prevention of serious health complications. We present NutriBench, the first publicly available natural language meal description nutrition benchmark. NutriBench consists of 11,857 meal descriptions generated from real-world global dietary intake data. The data is human-verified and annotated with macro-nutrient labels, including carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and calories. We conduct an extensive evaluation of NutriBench on the task of carbohydrate estimation, testing twelve leading Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, Llama3.1, Qwen2, Gemma2, and OpenBioLLM models, using standard, Chain-of-Thought and Retrieval-Augmented Generation strategies. Additionally, we present a study involving professional nutritionists, finding that LLMs can provide comparable but significantly faster estimates. Finally, we perform a real-world risk assessment by simulating the effect of carbohydrate predictions on the blood glucose levels of individuals with diabetes. Our work highlights the opportunities and challenges of using LLMs for nutrition estimation, demonstrating their potential to aid professionals and laypersons and improve health outcomes. Our benchmark is publicly available at: https://mehak126.github.io/nutribench.html
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Andong Hua, Mehak Preet Dhaliwal, Laya Pullela, Ryan Burke, Yao Qin. 2024-07-04. NutriBench: A Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models on Nutrition Estimation from Meal Descriptions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12843
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.