NutriBench: A Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Nutrition Estimation from Meal Descriptions
Keywords: Large Language Models, Nutrition Estimation, Dataset and Benchmark, AI for healthcare
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 more accurate and 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 type 1 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. We will make our benchmark publicly available.
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Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)
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Submission Number: 12467
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