Abstract
The World Health Organization identifies the overall increasing of noncommunicable diseases as a major issue, such as premature heart diseases, diabetes, and cancer. Unhealthy diets have been identified as the important causing factor of such diseases. In this context, personalized nutrition emerges as a new research field for providing tailored food intake advices to individuals according to their physical, physiological data, and further personal information. Specifically, in the last few years, several types of research have proposed computational models for personalized food recommendation using nutritional knowledge and user data. This paper presents a general framework for daily meal plan recommendations, incorporating as main feature the simultaneous management of nutritional-aware and preference-aware information, in contrast to the previous works which lack this global viewpoint. The proposal incorporates a pre-filtering stage that uses AHPSort as multi-criteria decision analysis tool for filtering out foods which are not appropriate to the current user characteristics. Furthermore, it incorporates an optimization-based stage for generating a daily meal plan whose goal is the recommendation of food highly preferred by the user, not consumed recently, and satisfying his/her daily nutritional requirements. A case study is developed for testing the performance of the recommender system.