A Novel Algorithm for the Design of Ketogenic Meals

Abstract

Introduction: The authors previously developed Ketty as a smartphone app for Ketogenic Diet patients. Ketty includes a food intake diary and a parameters monitoring section that allows the clinical staff to remotely oversee patients. In this work we describe a companion tool that has been implemented for empowering those patients in designing tasty meals. Methods: We used the Banca Dati Alimenti (BDA) provided by the Istituto Europeo di Oncologia as the source for the nutrition facts of the food ingredients and The Meal Db which is publicly available on the Internet as a source of recipes. We designed an algorithm for reshaping available recipes making them compliant with the dietary prescription.Results: A first standalone prototype written in Java has been implemented importing data from the BDA and interfacing through a Web Service with The Meal DB database. When a target prescription is provided in terms of lipids, carbohydrates and proteins, the algorithm first proposes a set of recipes to work with and then reshapes the selected one solving the planning meal problem.Conclusions: The prototype is be able to create recipes matching very closely the target provided and preserving their tastiness. We are planning to set up a formal validation study for the prototype and to integrate it into Ketty.