A few years ago, Beyoncé made headlines when she admitted to adopting a plant-based diet 44 days before her Coachella performance. While not adopting a permanent (or full) vegan lifestyle, she highlighted the health benefits as well as the environmental ones. As reported by Forbes, she and husband/fellow musician Jay-Z partnered with health expert Marco Borges to design a meal planner, available to any subscriber. The aim of 22 Days Nutrition is to provide everyone with the guidance Borges previously only provided to celebrities and the wealthy.
“Beyoncé and Jay Z’s meal planner represents an important step forward for the role that technology can play in guiding consumers to eat and shop for good. Everyone is trying to eat better. Technology can and should play a vital role in helping people shift their habits toward health, vitality and better performance,” wrote Michael Pellman Rowland for Forbes.
Like other meal planning websites, users can explore meal options and create meal plans and grocery lists. Food coaches and cooking videos are just some of the many tools. It also offers meal delivery, which helps combat food deserts. It is integrated with Instacart, Peapod and Amazon Fresh.
What sets this new plant-based meal planning program apart is the utilization of machine learning. Individual preferences, habits, and what people with similar preferences prefer to eat are taken into account. Then, after the user creates more specific preferences, the meal planner is better able to predict the types of meals the user will enjoy. In other words, AI works with users and adapts its recommendations to fit their needs as they change over time. Although this type of collaboration is new, we can expect it to become standard within the next decade.
This kind of tech can assist people in making lifestyle changes more easily. Beyoncé offered her own enthusiastic testimony to a plant-based lifestyle. “What I discovered was increased energy, better sleep, weight loss, improved digestion, clarity, and an incredibly positive feeling for my actions and the effects it would have on those around me and the environment.”
Reality Changing Observations:
1. What meal planning methods have you tried?
2. Are you interested in trying an AI-based nutrition program? Why or why not?
3. What does the addition of machine learning do to set this meal planning program apart? How could it be improved upon?
