Public health. Planetary health. Where do we begin with the seismic shifts required to lead to the transformational behaviour change that is required for both?
Nutrition Talent’s Danielle has recently had a paper published in Nutrition Bulletin titled “Nutritional intelligence in the food system: Combining food, health, data and AI expertise”.
She states:
As food and health data are generated beyond human scale, there is an opportunity for humans and AI to collaborate to enable informed decisions and action by all stakeholders within the food system. NI (nutritional intelligence) tools that help navigate the complexities of food, public and planetary health and empower individual agency in ways that respect socio-cultural factors have the potential to help drive the transformational changes required for public and planetary health.
Danielle has written before on the urgency to nutrition professionals, fiercely believing that we need to increase our understanding of this domain and that we need to be an active part of the technology transition that is happening at pace.
Why?
In the context of the food system, the involvement of food and nutrition experts throughout the process….is essential to ensure ongoing quality, accuracy and utility of outputs in a continually changing food environment.
Danielle repeatedly emphasises the critical need for “appropriate subject matter expertise”, using systems that are “responsibly created”, “verifiably trained” using “expert-informed processes to ensure appropriate, accurate outputs that are usable and useful”.
That’s us – nutrition professionals.
And here’s the challenge and the reward:
Simplification of the journey for everyone towards healthier sustainable choices that are appealing, simple to make, easily accessible and affordable should arguably be the central target for the transformational behaviour change required to improve public and planetary health.
Read Danielle’s paper here.
Glossary of terms
We don’t need to become tech experts – but let’s get our heads around some of the lingo!
AI: Artificial intelligence – leverages computers and machinery to stimulate decision-making.
Gen AI: Generative AI – a domain of AI that takes various inputs (eg video, text, images, audio) and generates new content.
HITL: Human in the loop
LLM: Large language models – offer a broad comprehension of language eg. ChatGPT
ML: Machine learning – a subdivision of AI that describes a subset of algorithms that are designed to learn from the data with which they are presented and identify complex patterns whilst also being capable of collecting and processing large amounts of unstructured data that traditional data techniques could not at a scale that is unmatched by humans.
NI: Nutritional intelligence
NLP: Natural language processing – the term used to describe the specific field of computer science used to interpret written and spoken text in a way that is understood by a computer.
PN: Precision nutrition – the use of personal information to deliver individualised nutrition advice rather than generic advice.
SLM: Small language models – offer highly precise, context-aware information that can drive accuracy and enable specialisation.
Related resources
Podcast – AI and keeping the ‘human in the loop’ with Markus Stripf
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