Description of the video:
Good afternoon,
everyone. Today, I'm presenting Meal
Planner, an AI-powered chatbot designed to
help students build affordable and
personalized meal plans. The goal of this
project was simple, make healthy eating
more accessible for students who are busy,
on tight budgets, or dealing with
dietary restrictions. Instead of spending
hours planning meals, comparing
prices, or figuring out
nutrition manually, users can interact
with our chatbot in plain language and
receive customized meal recommendations
instantly. Students face three major barriers when
trying to eat well. First is cost. Healthy food is
often perceived as expensive, so
students default to cheaper fast food
or instant meals. Second is dietary
complexity. Generic meal advice
doesn't work for people with allergies,
intolerances, or specific lifestyles like
vegetarian or halal diets. Third is
nutrition itself. Many students simply
don't know how to balance meals properly,
which can lead to low energy, poor focus, and
unhealthy eating habits over time. The core
issue is that meal planning requires
time, knowledge, and organization, resources
many students don't have. Meal Planner
addresses these issues through three
main functions. First is budget-aware
planning. Users can enter a weekly food
budget and the chat bot will generate an
affordable meal suggestion while minimizing
unnecessary spending. Second is dietary
intelligence. The chatbot adapts
recommendations automatically
based on allergies, intolerances, or
dietary preferences. Third is nutritional
optimization. Instead of just
suggesting random meals, the system
attempts to balance protein, nutrients,
and overall meal quality based on the
information we've given it from the
USDA and the FDA. The workflow is
designed to be simple. First, the user
chats with the bot naturally and provides
information like budget, goals, and
dietary restrictions. Second, the AI processes
those inputs and compares them against
a nutrition and recipe database that
we've given the AI. Third, the chatbot
generates a personalized meal plan along
with grocery suggestions and
estimated costs. Finally, the user can refine
the results in real time. For example,
they can remove ingredients they
dislike or request cheaper or higher
protein alternatives. One important feature is natural language
interaction. Users don't
need to fill out complicated forms.
They can simply just type requests
conversationally. The chatbot also
generates organized shopping lists
automatically, which makes the
recommendations more practical to
use in real life. Another feature is
accessibility across devices, allowing
students to use it on their phones,
tablets, or computers. The system also
supports meal variety and tracks nutrition
trends over time to encourage healthier
long-term habits. This matters
because the problem is larger than
just convenience. Many college students experience food
insecurity, limited budgets, and inconsistent nutrition. These issues directly
affect energy levels, concentration, and
academic performance. Specifically, almost
42% of college students will experience food
insecurity, and this is most likely due
to the fact that the average full-time student
will only be able to allocate $50 to their
food budget per week. This will lead to
them being three times more likely
to struggle academically due to
being undernourished. Meal Planner is
designed to reduce some of those
barriers by helping students make better
food decisions within realistic financial
constraints. The focus isn't
luxury meal prep or fitness culture.
It's practical nutrition support for
everyday students. Now I'll
demonstrate how the chatbot works
in practice. So let's say we're a
college sophomore on a vegan diet. We're
allergic to dairy, soy, and gluten. We have a
weekly budget of $100. What can we make? What are some good recipes? We give that to the
AI chatbot and now it will give us all the
information we need. It tells us what
our biggest problem is and what we
can build around. Due to most vegan
proteins being soy or gluten based, it gives
us even more specific protein choices to
build around because it took in mind our
dietary restrictions. now it tells us what
our core staples to be and it gives us a very
easy to copy grocery list which will be
very handy if you're on the go and can't
pull up the chat bot wherever you're at it
also gives us recipes as stated earlier for
example this lentil chili gives us ingredients
costs and why it works and then the source
which is from one of the cookbooks we give
it and another recipe and another. Now, it tells
us what a likely rotation would
be for breakfast, lunch, dinner,
and snacks. It then tells us the
nutritional gaps that we will likely face,
similar to how a nutritional professional
would educate you. For example,
supplementation and what to do in
the case of a vegan diet, as well as
what not to do. Furthermore, it even
helps specify what we like to work on,
such as a full seven -day meal plan, a
more specific grocery list, or even more
varieties of our diet. Altogether, the AI chatbot
works very well, and thank you for watching
this presentation.
