Please Don’t Ask ChatGPT for Diet Advice

Content warning: This story discusses disordered eating and weight loss diets.

ChatGPT stole yet another one of Google’s jobs. Since its launch last year, the AI-powered chatbot has been quietly shaping the way we search for advice on diet and nutrition.

Kind of disturbingly, people are turning to ChatGPT for custom meal plans. On TikTok, one user says she asked the bot for seven days’ worth of “endometriosis-friendly” food ideas that could help balance her hormones and manage her complicated condition. The jury is out on whether diet has any impact on endometriosis whatsoever, but the bot still spits out some meals. (When I asked for the same plan, I got grilled salmon with roasted sweet potatoes and rice cakes with almond butter and banana slices.) “It felt like a lot of food, so I was like, ‘Oh, can we make sure each day is like 1,700 calories,’” she tells her audience. Of course, ChatGPT accommodates the request.

Go deeper, and the AI chatbot is a well of “thinspo” advice. With few boundaries around what you can ask the app, users can quickly find themselves flooded with dangerous and completely unvetted dietary advice and potential nutritional misinformation. In fact, when I asked two experts to review and rate a handful of bot-created meal plans for common diets, they noted a couple of major red flags—and none of the plans passed with flying colors. (Keep reading for the results.) They both agreed: AI-generated dietary information could easily promote disordered eating behaviors.

Much of this is because ChatGPT only tells you what it thinks you want to hear. It may have been raised on a vast amount of information, but there is no guarantee that information is correct. It nails basic and noncontroversial asks with broad medical consensus. (Like, “What is diabetes?”) But it can also reflect and magnify our worst ideas. “There are doctors out there who advise people to eat nothing but meat,” says Desiree Nielsen, RD, a registered dietitian, host of The Allsorts Podcast, and author of various cookbooks. “There are dietitians who incorrectly advise that gluten is harmful to gut health. Health care professionals, as much as it pains me to say it, are not infallible.”

When I asked for a vegetarian meal plan, the results were vague and didn’t include recipes—but I knew at first glance it was simply not enough food. For a meal plan based on no more than 1,200 calories per day, it warned me this “may not be appropriate for everyone” but went on to serve up ideas like this very sad breakfast: “1 boiled egg, 1 slice of whole-grain toast, and ½ cup of berries.” Pushing it, I asked about all the ways people lose weight rapidly. Chat GPT said they weren’t great ideas but continued to list the excessive exercise regimes, crash diets like “juice cleanses” and eating “less than 1,000 calories per day,” and weight-loss pills that work by “suppressing appetite, increasing metabolism, or blocking the absorption of fat.”

In its defense, ChatGPT does offer some cautionary advice. When I asked it for the fastest way to lose weight, it responded reasonably: “As an AI language model, it is important to note that healthy and sustainable weight loss is a gradual process that requires consistent effort and patience.” Yet it’s easy to access harmful information by reframing the ask. Of course, misinformation is all over the internet in general. But using ChatGPT is different to manually trawling through blog posts, reported stories, and Reddit threads. ChatGPT distills all of this information into responses that are easily digestible, saving you time to research—and to verify.

Because of the way it’s been trained, AI also disproportionately favors English. That means it can generate advice and recipes that are based on Eurocentric preferences and characteristics. Meanwhile, weight “is perhaps one of the most challenging areas of nutrition care due to the interplay of all the cultural, genetic, socioeconomic, psychological, and emotional factors” involved, says Nielsen. A seemingly objective tool like BMI, which was modeled largely on white male bodies, means that whatever AI tells you is high or low risk is not based on a “representative sample of humans,” as Nielsen says.

Both of the experts I spoke to agreed that we shouldn’t use ChatGPT as a replacement dietitian—and need to be wary of any meal-planning ideas it generates. “The concern is that it might help promote unnecessarily restrictive diets and trigger vulnerable individuals, such as people with a history of disordered eating,” says Marisa Moore, RDN, a registered dietitian and author of The Plant Love Kitchen: An Easy Guide to Plant-Forward Eating. That’s something even ChatGPT will admit. When I asked the program how AI might promote harmful diet culture rhetoric, it was pretty self-aware: “By providing information or advice that reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward food, body image, and weight loss.”

As Nielsen points out, a chatbot firing off questionable responses is not the same thing as real, human-provided care. If information was all that was required for better health outcomes, “the internet would have already solved our problems long ago,” she says.

So, just how bad is ChatGPT at giving meal-planning advice? I had the bot generate seven-day meal plans (sans recipes) based on five common diets—less than 1,200 daily calories, keto, vegan, intermittent fasting, and Mediterranean—and asked experts to rate the results. Read on for the final grades, and remember to always consult a professional for any kind of health advice.

Overview: This very depressing but commonly attempted meal plan is all about restricting the amount of food you eat, primarily for weight loss. Here, AI came up with breakfasts like ½ cup oatmeal or one scrambled egg with a single slice of toast that’ll make your stomach rumble with hunger. Lunch was virtually the same everyday: One cup of vegetable soup, a mixed green salad and low-fat dressing, and a 4 oz. portion of grilled chicken or salmon. Dinner surfaced options like grilled shrimp, quinoa, and asparagus. Snacks included “1 small apple and 10 almonds.”

What’s good? Uh, there are vegetables present? Neither expert had anything positive to say about this one.

What’s not so good? “At first glance, this will look like a nutritionally balanced meal plan to the user, lulling them into thinking that this is a healthy way to lose weight,” says Nielsen. “I won’t speak to nutritional adequacy here except to state something that might help folks understand why this meal plan is so harmful: This level of energy is inadequate for anyone over the age of two. The meal plan lays bare the deeply dangerous potential of AI.”

Overview: Keto is a controversial low-carb diet that coaxes the body into burning fats rather than sugars and carbs. Medically, it’s mostly used to treat conditions like epilepsy, and it prioritizes high-fat and protein-rich foods that’ll give you the meat sweats just reading about them. For breakfast, ChatGPT suggested meals like scrambled eggs with spinach, bacon, and avocado, or Greek yogurt with nuts and berries. Some kind of animal protein and greens, like zucchini noodles with meatballs, were typical for lunch and dinner.

What’s good? “This meal plan contains a lot less red meat than I would have expected,” says Nielsen. Keto diets tend to be light on vegetables, because of their carb content, but this one makes some effort to include produce at every meal. However, says Nielsen, someone who might medically need to follow this meal plan “can’t be sure that the balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrate is actually adequate to achieve ketosis,” a metabolic state in which your body burns fat instead of sugar. What’s not so good? Beyond treating legitimate but few medical conditions, such as nonresponsive epilepsy, most dietitians don’t recommend a keto diet. It’s “deeply restrictive,” could exacerbate eating disorders, and sets people up for “sky-high cholesterol levels and nutrient deficiencies.” says Nielsen. It’s also super low in fiber, which can cause constipation. Because ketosis tends to decrease sodium in the body, “people on a long-term keto diet also need to increase their sodium intake, which is super dangerous to do if you are not sure you’re in ketogenic metabolism, and super dangerous not to do if you are,” she adds.

Overview: According to ChatGPT, “a vegan diet is one that eliminates all animal products, including meat, dairy, eggs, and honey.” The kinda bland seven-day meal plan suggested I eat vegan yogurt with fruit and granola for breakfast; hummus and a vegetable wrap with baby carrots for lunch; and vegan shepherd’s pie for dinner. What’s good? “AI knows legumes exist!” says Nielsen. The plan includes some sort of bean or lentil for lunch or dinner, which are a great source of fiber, vitamins and minerals, and vegan protein.

What’s not so good? That said, “the breakfast meals appear consistently low in protein, which might leave the person feeling hungry—especially without a snack,” says Moore. She notes the plan is also low in essential vitamins and minerals, such as omega-3 fatty acids, B12, zinc, iron, and calcium. Nielsen agrees, adding that “some of these days don’t seem like a lot of food.”

Overview: This diet, designed specifically for weight loss, typically involves not eating for about 16 hours and then smashing a day’s worth of food in eight hours. For this seven-day plan, ChatGPT not only suggested three meals and two snacks per day, but also the times which people should eat them—spanning from noon until 8 p.m. Follow this plan and you’d be eating avocado toast with a poached egg for “breakfast” at noon, grilled chicken with roasted vegetables for lunch at 4 p.m., and salmon with quinoa for dinner at 8 p.m.

What’s good? “It is making an effort to get fruits and vegetables into almost every meal and snack, which, for the average American, is more than they’re currently eating,” says Nielsen. “Honestly, if this was a client’s food record—minus the time restricted eating—I would say that it’s clear they are making efforts to eat a balanced whole food diet. Gold star, robot!”

What’s not so good? That said, intermittent fasting can be dangerous for menstruating adults and people with a history of disordered eating—the latter of “which will be many of the same people who are searching for this very meal plan,” says Nielsen. “Ignoring your natural hunger cues in order to fit the eight-hour eating window can be deeply harmful to your relationship with food and your body. Plus, it may be physically harmful depending on your preexisting conditions, such as diabetes.” (Fasting for long periods can cause insulin levels to spike and drop.)

Overview: There are no real rules around the Mediterranean diet, but the general vibe is to eat whole grains, plants, and good-for-your-heart fats like olive oil. It’s inherently a diet with a lot of options and few restrictions. With the spotlight on ingredients like feta cheese and pasta and pita bread, ChatGPT’s plan for this one actually looks delicious and not too dissimilar from what I eat in a regular week (minus the meat). ChatGPT suggested toast with avocado and poached eggs for breakfast; falafel salad with mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumber, and tahini for lunch; baked salmon with roasted veg for dinner; and “apple slices with almond butter” or a non-prescriptive “handful of almonds” for snacks.

What’s good? “This meal plan offers plenty of fruits and vegetables without neglecting nuts or legumes,” says Nielsen, who would “green-light” most of the meals for her clients. “This diet is very noncontroversial and well researched, so it makes sense that ChatGPT knocked this one out of the park.”

What’s not so good? That said, it might not be a great option as is for vegans or vegetarians. “I would have liked to see more legumes, as I am wondering what [this group] would do for protein. It’s also deeply Eurocentric and not right for everyone in terms of cultural eating,” says Nielsen.

Apparently losing weight is racist and grounded in white supremacy, according to brain dead commies!

2 posted on 05/03/2023 1:11:34 PM PDT by No name given (Anonymous is who you’ll know me as)

I’d summarize this as: Author and dietician don’t like their replacement.

The advice about a Mediterranean Diet is very “Eurocentric”?

Almost like the Mediterranean Sea borders Europe?

Idiots.

4 posted on 05/03/2023 1:14:45 PM PDT by Jewbacca (The residents of Iroquois territory may not determine whether Jews may live in Jerusalem.)

What’s not so good? That said, intermittent fasting can be dangerous for menstruating adults...

What's not so good is the woke author's abuse of the language. Has he never heard the word "WOMEN"???

"Menstruating adults" -- what thorough BS. May that execrable usage die a quick and very painful death along with its adherents and users.

5 posted on 05/03/2023 1:20:08 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (I don’t like to think before I say something...I want to be just as surprised as everyone else…)

Tell me ChatGPT, does this dress make me look fat?

“I’d summarize this as: Author and dietician don’t like their replacement.”

You nailed it.

She is also biased towards veganism and vegetarianism.

I would fire her if she were my dietitian, regardless of AI.

ChatGPT,
I’d like a Keto diet plan, but with lots of carbs.

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