Should you take nutrition advice from a chatbot? Experts urge caution
Readers share their experiences asking chatbots for help with meal planning. It went well… until it didn’t.
(Art: The New York Times)
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When Julie Bernstein’s doctor recently recommended that she start eating chicken and steak to get more protein, she felt a bit irritated. Bernstein, 76, had been vegan for decades, and she was not about to start eating meat again, she said. Her physician, lacking ideas on how to guide her toward vegan protein sources, suggested she turn to ChatGPT.
A few weeks later, Bernstein typed her goals into ChatGPT on her iPad and marvelled at how quickly it churned out protein-forward menu ideas, grocery lists and meal-prep instructions that incorporated lentils, quinoa, protein powder and chia seeds.
“It was like a cookbook tailored for me,” said Bernstein, who lives in Harbour Springs, Michigan. The responses seemed to “get” her, she said.
Since ChatGPT was released in 2022, chatbots have become a popular source of health information. In a survey of more than 5,500 US adults published in April, 1 in 4 respondents said they had recently used chatbots for health guidance. Another survey, published in January, found that among 1,000 US adults, a third reported having used ChatGPT or another artificial intelligence-powered tool to create nutrition or weight loss plans.
New York Times readers were recently asked to share their experiences with using chatbots for help with nutrition; more than 500 people responded. Their stories were overwhelmingly positive, with many delighting in the bots’ abilities to provide quick and helpful advice.
Nutrition experts say that while chatbots can be useful for straightforward tasks like brainstorming meal ideas, they can also sometimes lead people astray.
Here are some of the stories readers shared, with experts’ thoughts on the promises – and potential pitfalls – of relying on chatbots for nutrition advice.
PROS: MEAL PLANNING, NUTRIENT TRACKING, ACCOUNTABILITY
After Vanessa Crain, 47, was diagnosed with heart disease in 2025, she vowed to get serious about her diet. On her cardiologist’s recommendation, she started trying to follow the heart-healthy DASH diet, which emphasises fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
For hours on weekends, she’d pore over cookbooks and plan meals for the week – tasks that quickly became burdensome along with her work and family obligations. So Crain, a kindergarten teacher in Longwood, Florida, outsourced that planning to Claude.
Within a week of following its suggestions, she “felt like a different person,” she said, with more energy and fewer cravings for junk food. The bot even recommended healthier takeout options for when she didn’t have time to cook. She lost 10 pounds (4.5kg) in two months.
The mental load of figuring out what to eat is often the most difficult aspect of eating healthfully, said Dr Lisa Oldson, an obesity medicine physician at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
In her own practice, Oldson embraces AI. She counsels patients on how to use chatbots for healthy eating, and uses ChatGPT herself to estimate the nutrient content of meals – like protein and fibre levels – that her patients are logging.
Using chatbots as accountability partners can be a “beautiful use” of the technology, said Wesley McWhorter, a dietitian in Houston. But pay attention if the reminders start feeling too rigid or cause anxiety, he added. That may do more harm than good.
PITFALLS: INACCURATE, SOMETIMES HARMFUL ADVICE
Chatbots are convenient and fast, but sometimes they give “incredibly bad advice,” said Nick Tiller, who researches health misinformation at the Lundquist Institute in Torrance, California.
Alex Rawdin, 39, a financial adviser in Philadelphia, recently asked the chatbot Tomo to help him lose weight. After several weeks of following the high-fat, low-carbohydrate keto diet, as it recommended, he remembered that his doctor had told him to limit animal protein because of his kidney stones.
When Rawdin relayed that information to the bot, it advised that he stop the diet. He wished the chatbot had asked about his medical history before recommending it, he said. “I found myself kind of ridiculing” the bot, he added. “Then I realised I was talking to a machine.”
Chatbots aren’t trained in assessing your health history or using clinical judgement the way a professional is, said Dawn Clifford, a dietitian and professor of health sciences at Northern Arizona University.
In a study published in March, researchers from Turkey asked five popular chatbots to create three-day meal plans to help a few fictional overweight or obese 15-year-olds lose weight. The bots produced menus that contained, on average, about 700 fewer daily calories than a dietitian on the team did. If this guidance were followed long-term, the authors wrote, it could put adolescents at risk for malnutrition and eating disorders.
Shelley Wood, a gastroenterology dietitian in San Jose, California, often sees patients who are following unnecessarily restrictive diets based on chatbot suggestions. She described one patient who – after many conversations with ChatGPT – had ended up eating only papaya, spinach, chicken and eggs for months to help relieve issues like bloating and stomach pain. The patient lost a concerning amount of weight, Wood said, and had fatigue and hair loss.
Following a chatbot’s nutrition advice could be “benign” – or it could be “catastrophic,” Tiller said. In a study published in April, he and his colleagues asked five chatbots various health-related questions. Among the 50 nutrition-related responses they received, 72 per cent were rated as being ineffective or harmful if followed, he said.
Because AI models are evolving rapidly, chatbots are likely giving more appropriate responses today, Tiller said. (Their study was conducted in February 2025.) Still, he added, it’s doubtful that all of their problems have been resolved.
Chatbots are only as good as the data they’re trained on, which include a range of sources like books, websites, scientific studies, social media posts and Reddit threads, some of which can be contradictory and inaccurate, Tiller said.
“It only takes a tiny amount of misinformation” to confuse a chatbot, he added. Yet they “always respond confidently and authoritatively,” even when those responses are dubious, Tiller said. They will rarely acknowledge when they don’t have a good answer, he added, making it difficult to know when the advice is bad.
Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for OpenAI (which makes ChatGPT), said via email that the bots are not designed to be a substitute for medical care.
USING CHATBOTS WITH CAUTION
For all of their potential pitfalls, many readers felt appreciative of the guidance that chatbots provided. Some said they offered something their doctors or other health professionals couldn’t: support in seconds, at any hour, no appointment or co-pay required.
There is no doubt that chatbots can be helpful, McWhorter said, but if you find yourself turning to them for tasks like diagnosing or man ageinga medical condition, or for guidance on supplements or major dietary changes – it’s best to run the responses by a doctor.
If possible, he said, schedule a visit with a dietitian. They have far more nutrition training than most physicians do and offer longer appointment times.
It’s also worth asking chatbots to supply references and to check that they’re from reliable places, like academic institutions, peer-reviewed journals or health organisations such as the American Heart Association or the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Clifford said.
And try the same prompt on multiple chatbots, she added. Different answers are a clue that at least one of them may be inaccurate.
The bottom line is that you should use chatbots with caution, Tiller said. They’re not “all-knowing oracles.”
By Alice Callahan © The New York Times Company
The article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Source: New York Times/mm
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