Towards Health-Aware Fairness in Food Recipe Recommendation

Food recommendation systems play a crucial role in promoting personalized recommendations designed to help users find food and recipes that align with their preferences. However, many existing food recommendation systems have overlooked the important aspect of healthy-food and nutritional value of recommended foods, thereby limiting their effectiveness in generating truly healthy recommendations. Our preliminary analysis indicates that users tend to respond positively to unhealthy food and recipes. As a result, existing food recommender systems that neglect health considerations often assign high scores to popular items, inadvertently encouraging unhealthy choices among users. In this study, we propose the development of a fairness-based model that prioritizes health considerations. Our model incorporates fairness constraints from both the user and item perspectives, integrating them into a joint objective framework. Experimental results conducted on real-world food datasets demonstrate that the proposed system not only maintains the ability of food recommendation systems to suggest users' favorite foods but also improves the health factor compared to unfair models, with an average enhancement of approximately 35%.