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Introducing CoDiet

Horizon Europe project to combat diet-related diseases through novel monitoring technologies and personalised nutrition.

• The CoDiet project will trial innovative diet-monitoring technologies to improve our understanding of the relationship between the food we eat and common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
• The project will use this enhanced understanding to develop artificial intelligence tools to deliver personalised nutritional advice aimed at preventing these diseases and creating a healthier society for all.

A new research project has launched to investigate the relationship between diet and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) by trialling innovative monitoring technologies, such as wearable smart-cameras, and developing artificial intelligence tools to deliver personalised dietary advice.

Unhealthy diets are associated with metabolic changes and increased risk of NCDs, such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer. According to the World Health Organisation, NCDs kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 74% of all deaths globally.

However, little is known about the dietary mechanisms that actually drive NCDs, and the current tools used to collect dietary information rely on self-reporting, which can be unreliable. There is also a lack of data relating to vulnerable groups, such as those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, where NCDs are often over-represented*.

Developed by Imperial College London and led by AZTI, a research centre based in the Basque County, Spain, the EU-funded CoDiet project will address these knowledge gaps and develop a bespoke artificial intelligence-based tool that can assess individual, diet-induced NCD risk and deliver personalised dietary advice.

An intelligent, wearable camera, developed by Imperial College London, is one of the tools to collect dietary information that the project will test. The camera is designed to be worn on the ear and passively record what the wearer eats; it will use novel computer vision and deep learning techniques to automatically recognise food types and estimate portion sizes. This will be coupled with other technologies that help us understand how food is processed in the body, including analysis of the gut microbiome and metabolites in the urine.

The project will also develop a tool that will simulate change in NCDs in response to diet at the population level, with the goal of promoting the uptake of NCD-protective diets. Currently, efforts to tackle these issues on a population scale take a ‘one size fits all’ approach, and the hope is that personalised dietary advice can lead to more effective results.

Lead researcher Dr Itziar Tueros, Head of Food and Health at AZTI, said:

“It is well established that each person’s metabolic response to the same diet differs. CoDiet will work on the personalisation of dietary advice instead of the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

“In order to develop a holistic solution to the major challenge of preventing NCDs, it is essential to assemble a multidisciplinary team of leading scientists. This is what CoDiet does.”

Professor Gary Frost, Head of Nutrition Research at Imperial College London, said:

“One of the major gaps in our knowledge is accurate understanding of what people eat in their day to day lives. The tools we currently have are inaccurate which makes it very difficult to understand the relationship between diet and disease.

CoDiet puts this problem at the centre of the project and brings together a number of new technologies to address this shortcoming. By doing this we believe we will be able to design new individual-based policies to prevent common lifestyle-related diseases.”

The project includes researchers from seventeen research and academic institutions across ten countries: AZTI (Spain), Czech Technical University (Czech Republic), Teagasc – Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Ireland), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Israel), CIC bioGUNE (Spain), University of Valencia (Spain), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), Bruker Biospin (Germany), Microcaya (Spain), Sciensano (Belgium), University of Trento (Italy),  Consorcio Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red (CIBER) (Spain), Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italy), National Institute for Health Development (Estonia), Imperial College London (UK), and the University of Leicester (UK).

ENDS

*Socioeconomic inequalities in non-communicable diseases and their risk factors: an overview of systematic reviews, BMC Public Health

The CoDiet project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe grant number 101084642.

CoDiet research activities taking place at Imperial College London and the University of Leicester are supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number 101084642].