CoDiet is an international research project that aims to combat diet-related diseases through innovative monitoring technologies and personalised nutrition. Unhealthy diets are associated with changes in the body that increase our risk of common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity. These diseases are also known as non-communicable diseases i.e. diseases that can’t be transmitted from person to person.
According to the World Health Organisation, non-communicable diseases kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 74% of all deaths globally.
However, little is known about the actual steps that link what we eat to the development of non-communicable diseases, and the current tools used to collect dietary information rely on self-reporting, such as through food journals, which can be inaccurate and unreliable.
Importantly, there is also a lack of data relating to vulnerable groups, such as those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, where NCDs are often over-represented.
Led by AZTI, a research centre based in the Basque County, Spain, the EU-funded CoDiet project plans to address these gaps in our knowledge and develop new ways to personalise dietary advice and help society to become healthier.
We aim to create the most comprehensive overview of the relationships between diet, bodily processes, and non-communicable diseases ever produced.
We will test an intelligent, wearable camera that can be worn on the ear to passively record what the wearer eats, and use AI to automatically recognise food types and estimate portion sizes.
CoDiet plans on combining the information we gather from existing research, the information we get from new ways to monitor diets, as well as other information that often isn’t considered, such as genetics, metabolism, and gut bacteria, to improve our understanding of this pathway and discover new indicators of disease risk. The project will also use AI to help us analyse this information and to connect the dots that humans usually wouldn’t be able to find.
By using the information gathered throughout the project we will develop an AI tool that can deliver personalised dietary advice based on a person’s genetics, blood profile, gut bacteria and more.
We plan to trial this tool across four of our partner countries: Spain, Ireland, the UK, and Greece.
CoDiet is assessing the current policies in place that are aimed at improving diets in six EU countries, and creating a tool that can simulate how diet and other risk factors affect the development of diseases at a population level. This will allow us to estimate the impact of potential policies for particular countries.
Through Codiet, we are building evidence around what policies would be best to help society to become healthier and lower the burden of non-communicable diseases.