Can OpenAI's GPTs become our clinic nutritionist?

The time needed to attain a complete dietary history and to create a personalized dietary plan is certainly too much for a standard physician visit. Not only that, frequent follow-up is important to support these major lifestyle modifications. So, could AI be used as a support tool for patients seeking nutritional counseling? Introducing GPTs:

OpenAI released GPTs last year which allows users to pre-train the ChatGPT AI for specific tasks. For example, you can tell a GPT “you are a nutritional counselor for patients with diabetes, please provide a dietary plan for patients,” and it will behave like a nutritionist. Here’s how the setup looks:

Then when you ask the GPT, called “NutriGuide for Diabetes”, it should help suggest healthy meals. See below what it suggested:

You can also upload articles or documents to the GPT to help it become an expert in the field. For example, we could upload the AAFP article on “Diabetes and Nutrition” and the GPT will reference recommendations from this article.

Additionally, GPTs are tailored to deliver a specific tone of voice based on the creators preference. For example, a GPT for nutrition coaching might have an enthusiastic tone with frequent encouragement and emojis, and one for a business application might have a professional tone without colloquial language.

Here is a public GPT called “Diabetes Coach” with over 300 public users so far:

The GPT will give you prompts that you can use to initiate a conversation. For example, with Diabetes Coach, we can ask to “Recommend a 2000-calorie meal plan for the day”, and after specifying my dietary restrictions, this is what it provided:

Of course, this plan does not take into consideration my current meals, where I go grocery shopping, my daily budget, the time that I spend at work, where I eat out, etc. But if I input this data, the GPT can easily create a very specific dietary and exercise plan. This GPT can even do a rough “calorie count” of my food from a picture:

Here are my thoughts

I do not think any technology can come close to replacing Sheryl, especially in the personal relationships and rapport she forms with patients and her breadth of experience and expertise. However, for those small clinics without a budget for a nutritionist, there may be an unfilled need for these services.

Of course, Telehealth companies already have services for nutritional counseling, and AI in nutrition counseling has been around (see the NYTimes article on DayTwo). Additionally, well known apps like MyFitnessPal and SnapCalorie are already using camera assisted calorie counting and large language models.

The other limitations with using GPTs is that it requires a subscription to ChatGPT Pro (20$/month) and a provider cannot see what recommendations their patient is receiving from the app. No one wants to end up like Air Canada when their AI chatbot made up a refund policy that did not exist, and the airline was forced to pay back the ticket by a small claims court.

These are my thoughts so far. If you have an opinion on whether an AI Nutritionist would be useful or effective please let me know. Better yet, if you’ve ever used a service like this, I’d be curious to hear about your experience.

Wishing everyone a happy Monday!

Best,

Maxime Rappaport, MD