What's On My Plate: Towards Recommending Recipe Variations for Diabetes Patients.

As community-based recipe platforms continue to grow in popularity, recipe recommendation is an active research area. Simultaneously, the analysis of online recipes can provide us with insights on dietary patterns in particular communities. In this paper, we focus on recipe recommendation for a user group that is constrained in terms of choices: diabetes patients need to balance their diet more than average persons and to be aware of the nutritional value of their meals. First, we discuss the type of situations where diabetes-specific food recommendations are desirable. Further, we analyze how people’s age and gender interact with food intake. Based on a large dataset, we explore how variations in ‘canonical meals’ can be exploited for recommending which alternatives better fit the user’s dietary requirements.