Personalized diet oriented by artificial intelligence and ethnic foods
Authors: Kwon Dae Young 
Published: March 2020

In the future, societies will endeavor to move beyond the framework of the industrial economy and the world will enter a new era marked by super-aged populations, artificial intelligence (AI), and the lifestyle economy. It is predicted that humanity will shift away from the industrial economy to a lifestyle economy where the main focus is human happiness. Human thought and behavior is influenced by emotions and cannot be explained entirely through rational decision-making. Accordingly, AI and other super connection technologies that drive big data and deep learning will facilitate the introduction of personalized and decentralized services, which represent a shift away from the era of mass production, centralization and automation. This means that more attention will be paid to designing unique lifestyles instead of production. In the future, super-aged societies will no longer be steeped in individualism, and become more people-centric. In such societies, obtaining an accurate understanding of people’s noneun style (other activities style beyond working as leisure, play, and others) and dietary style to deliver personalized foods conducive to healthy eating and healthy lifestyles will be of great importance. Personalized diets will be developed based on structured data drawn from human genes, which do not change. However, unstructured data about epigenetics and microbiomes, which can be influenced by lifestyle and diet, will be important for designing personalized foods and lifestyles. Diversity in foods is the most important factor in generating this unstructured data. Because the responsibility for maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle falls on individuals, developing personalized food and lifestyle products is an important step towards reaching the centenarian era. Developing personalized diets requires technologies such as super-connectivity, AI, and the Internet of humans (IoHuman) rather the internet of things (IoT), but researching these technologies is not a job for the food industry. Technologies developed in other fields can be used in food science research, and these technologies fall under the umbrella of “foodomics.” Such technologies include genetic analysis, whole genome sequence analysis, nutrigenomics, metabolomics, nutrigenetics, nutriepigenetics, microbiome technology, sensomics, and culturomics, as well as “sikdanomics.” Korea has a lot of potential when it comes to personalized foods and diets. Because Korea has a long agricultural history, the country has a wide range of natural foods, and many ways to prepare and eat these foods. This means that Korean foods, in particular traditional Korean foods, are well positioned to meet the demand for diversity in personalized foods. In a super-aged era characterized by AI, Korea has a good chance of becoming a country where people can live to 100 in good health and also has the potential to be a global leader in personalized diets. To achieve this, food scientists and medical professionals need to work together to convince the Korean government to lead the industry in the right direction.