AI is helping solve malnutrition

As any good futurist will tell you, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, when deployed responsibly, can be a powerful force for good in our world. They can be used to answer fundamental questions about human health, such as early detection of diseases such as cancer and heart disease, allowing for earlier life-saving interventions.

These technologies are helping to create new solutions that accelerate human prosperity, and 27% of workers in developed countries, who work in highly exposed and highly complementary occupations, stand to gain productivity and productivity benefits from AI. Ready to reap financial benefits. A future where we all work efficiently while driverless cars drive our chauffeured highways is much closer to reality than we once thought possible. As these technologies rapidly expand and benefit wealthy countries, now is a critical time to ensure equal access around the world to avoid deepening the digital divide.

Perhaps nowhere is this comprehensive progress more important than in global nutrition. Given that 40 percent of the planet cannot afford a healthy diet and malnutrition is the leading cause of death and poor health worldwide, this is an area where scalable solutions are deeply needed.

Initial applications, mainly in wealthy countries, are very promising. AI is used to recognize different dishes, calculate prices, provide nutritional information, and complete transactions in catering services, using deep metric learning to accurately identify each dish in just 0.3 seconds. AI-powered apps like Fooducate can also help people track what they’re eating, see the nutritional profile of their food, and receive recommendations for people with diet-related illnesses like diabetes. Helpful.

AI and other digital tools are now beginning to be deployed around the world, and locally-driven innovation is poised to take advantage of these technologies. Publicly-funded research supports AI assistants (already deployed to recognize food in wealthy markets) to identify crop diseases in plants. This provides critical insights to help farmers adapt to these risks, breed only healthy plants, and achieve disease-free fields.

Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which already boasts 100 million weekly users and are used to maximize efficiency in their daily work, are helping front-line workers learn about kangaroo mother care. It is also used for guidance and promotes skin-to-skin contact for low birth weight babies. and exclusive breastfeeding. This is just one of 50 innovations recognized by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Initiative. Last year, the Foundation awarded $5 million in grants to projects that leverage LLMs to reduce global inequality.

These techniques can also be used to make food safer. Blockchain is being used to provide sourcing information to producers and consumers of African indigenous vegetables, helping to reassure people that the food they are consuming is safe and helping growers to harvest We encourage you to verify the quality of water used for subsequent treatment.

Many of these technologies are now being utilized by digital extension agents and more commercially advanced operations. However, given the rapid proliferation of smart devices and connectivity even in rural areas, it is likely that in the near future consumers will be checking the nutritional value of their food and where it comes from in every independent store around the world. It’s not difficult to imagine. , where can I buy it cheaply?

The next frontier for AI in nutrition is understanding the very nature of food itself in ways that have the potential to profoundly change the course of human health. A large-scale international effort called the Periodic Table of Foods is mapping the composition of foods at the biomolecular level. The open-access data platform enables users around the world to optimize regenerative farming practices, inform dietary guidelines, target food production to combat climate change, understand the impact of food on gut health, and more. Masu.

When it comes to gut health, the content of your gut microbiome is directly linked to a wide range of health and nutritional outcomes, as evidenced in a landmark 2013 study. Research on microbiome-oriented foods is now starting to appear online. There’s exciting new research on probiotic supplements for B. infantis, an important gut bacterium that helps break down sugars in breast milk. If babies who aren’t born with enough bacteria receive enough bacteria through these interventions, malabsorption of key nutrients could be prevented for life.

We can even imagine a future of precision nutrition for everyone. There, people have access to technology that can predict how they uniquely respond to different foods and different nutrients, regardless of their origin or economic status, allowing them to optimize nutritional interventions. Helpful.

A world of abundance is possible, and we can use AI to get there faster. The prize is human progress, and that’s the prize any good futurist seeks.

Matt Freeman is Executive Director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.