Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Analyze Recipes for Diabetes

Several studies have evaluated the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) for meal planning, yielding positive outcomes. These models can process natural language inputs and leverage learned knowledge from their pretraining to generate meal plans. In this work, we investigate the ability of LLMs to analyze the suitability of given recipes for diabetes. The primary challenge for LLMs is to retrieve relevant dietary guidelines for diabetes, decompose recipes into ingredients and cooking methods, and apply these guidelines to determine the recipe's suitability. To study these challenges, we employ three kinds of prompts namely, (i) Direct Query Prompt (ii) Context-Guided Prompt, and (iii) Exemplary Context Prompt that incorporate different levels of diabetes dietary guidelines from medical sources. We introduce a benchmark dataset curated for this investigation consisting of 7607 recipes that include 3807 recipes suitable for diabetes and 3800 recipes not suitable for diabetes. Our results demonstrate that most LLMs are cautious in predicting recipes as suitable to prevent detrimental outcomes. Further, the models that can reason using the dietary guidelines performed better in predicting the suitability of recipes for diabetes. Overall, Mistral-7B and Llama 70B showed superior performance to their counterparts.