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Optimization-based dietary recommendations for healthy eating

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 80, pages 130–134 (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Various diet scores have been developed to assess compliance with dietary guidelines. Yet, enhancing those diet scores is very challenging. Here, we tackle this issue by formalizing an optimization problem and solving it with simulated annealing. Our optimization-based dietary recommendation (ODR) approach, evaluated using Diet-Microbiome Association study data, provides efficient and reasonable recommendations for different diet scores. ODR has the potential to enhance nutritional counseling and promote dietary adherence for healthy eating.

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Fig. 1: Optimizing diet scores is nontrivial because of the interdependency of food and nutrition components in the diet scores.
Fig. 2: Optimizing three different diet scores yield different dietary recommendations.

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Data availability

The data and code used in this work are available at https://github.com/spxuw/ODR.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01AI141529, R01HD093761, R35CA253185, RF1AG067744, UH3OD023268, U19AI095219, U01HL089856, U01-152905, and U01-167552) and Cancer Grand Challenges Team PROSPECT. Y.-Y.L. acknowledges funding support from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, through the Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program (Focused Program Award) under award no. W81XWH-22-S-TBIPH2, endorsed by the Department of Defense. X.-W.W. acknowledges the funding support from National Institutes of Health (K25HL166208).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Xu-Wen Wang, Scott T. Weiss, Frank B. Hu & Yang-Yu Liu

  2. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Frank B. Hu

  3. Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Frank B. Hu

Authors
  1. Xu-Wen Wang
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  2. Scott T. Weiss
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  3. Frank B. Hu
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  4. Yang-Yu Liu
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Contributions

YYL conceived and designed the project. XWW performed all the numerical calculations. XWW and YYL wrote the manuscript. XWW, YLL, FBH, and STW analyzed the results, edited, and approved the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yang-Yu Liu.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

This study is a secondary analysis of de‑identified data collected in previous research. All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Ethical approval for the original study was obtained from the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board. Informed consent was obtained from all participants in the original study. The IRB approval number for the original study is not available.

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Wang, XW., Weiss, S.T., Hu, F.B. et al. Optimization-based dietary recommendations for healthy eating. Eur J Clin Nutr 80, 130–134 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-025-01655-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-025-01655-5

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