I Asked ChatGPT To Make My Meal Plan For The Week: Here's What Happened

Here are the prompts I used to generate a meal plan, my top takeaways from the process as a nutritionist, and what dietitians have to say. 

If you're not familiar with ChatGPT, it's an advanced computer program that uses artificial intelligence to talk to like a virtual friend. To use it, you type or speak your questions or thoughts (prompts), and it will respond in a conversational way. It's trained to understand and generate humanlike text, which is why people use it for things like getting help with homework, brainstorming ideas, practicing languages, or just having casual conversations.

Once I entered my initial prompt, ChatGPT asked me to provide a list of the ingredients from my fridge, freezer, and pantry and to specify dietary preferences, restrictions, and cuisines we prefer. Once ChatGPT had all that information, it started generating a five-day meal plan for me. 

After much back-and-forth with ChatGPT, here is the final five-day meal plan it generated for my family. 

As someone who loves to cook and is comfortable in the kitchen, meal planning doesn't require much thought or time. I spend maybe 10 to 15 minutes thinking about our meal plan before grocery shopping and cooking. By the time I finished the back-and-forth conversation with ChatGPT to make adjustments, I had spent 90 minutes on a meal plan I still wasn't too impressed with. 

"For a registered dietitian, 'smoothie' may mean a nutrient-packed meal that is adequate in energy, but to the average person with less nutrition knowledge, just indicating 'smoothie' as a meal may result in a fruit and almond-milk-only option that leaves the individual hungry soon after," adds Jones.

Butler adds that the lack of resources available for AI to pull from to develop inclusive nutrition options is a nod to why utilizing diverse practitioners to support research, recipe, and consumer-facing educational resource development is so important.

Despite telling ChatGPT what foods to avoid due to allergies, it kept including them in the meal plan. I found myself giving the same prompts over and over again. Once the meal plan was finalized and I asked ChatGPT to generate a grocery list based on the plan, it left off a number of items. 

"The approximate portions would be helpful, especially for the protein and carbohydrate amount, to make sure you're both meeting your needs based on how active you are that day," says registered dietitian and sports nutritionist Rachel Hannah, R.D. "The longer we work out for and the higher the intensity, the more carbohydrates our body needs that day, so these targets would be useful in this plan. I often give approximate carb and protein targets for athletes to make sure they are meeting their needs on more active days." 

I might have had better luck asking ChatGPT to give me dinner ideas only and then using leftovers for the next day's lunch. 

I asked ChatGPT to come up with a well-rounded, high-protein meal plan for my family to put the AI platform's nutrition knowledge to the test. Turns out, it doesn't hold a candle to IRL nutritionists. Overall, it was a frustrating experience that involved constantly having to remind ChatGPT about our dietary preferences and allergies, and I wasn't impressed with the final meal plan. Lesson learned: Nutrition is inherently personal—and inherently human.