Informed Diet Selection: Increasing Food Literacy through Crowdsourcing

Paper by Niels van Berkel et al: “The obesity epidemic is one of the greatest threats to health and wellbeing throughout much of the world. Despite information on healthy lifestyles and eating habits being more accessible than ever before, the situation seems to be growing worse  And for a person who wants to lose weight there are practically unlimited options and temptations to choose from. Food, or dieting, is a booming business, and thousands of companies and vendors want their cut by pitching their solutions, particularly online (Google) where people first turn to find weight loss information. In our work, we have set to harness the wisdom of crowds in making sense of available diets, and to offer a direct way for users to increase their food literacy during diet selection.  The Diet Explorer is a crowd-powered online knowledge base that contains an arbitrary number of weight loss diets that are all assessed in terms of an arbitrary set of criteria…(More)”.