Recipe Networks and the Principles of Healthy Food on the Web

People increasingly use the Internet to make food-related choices, prompting research on food recommendation systems. Recently, works that incorporate nutritional constraints into the recommendation process have been proposed to promote healthier recipes. Ingredient substitution is also used, particularly by people motivated to reduce the intake of a specific nutrient or in order to avoid a particular category of ingredients due for instance to allergies. This study takes a complementary approach towards empowering people to make healthier food choices by simplifying the process of identifying plausible recipe substitutions. To achieve this goal, this work constructs a large-scale network of similar recipes, and analyzes this network to reveal interesting properties that have important implications to the development of food recommendation systems.