CSU Long Beach students create healthy eating app

LONG BEACH, Calif. — For CSU Long Beach student Naveen Palanisamy, finding ways to eat a healthy meal with limited options is a busy schedule. 

“You know how student life is,” he said. “We are very busy, and we are also very tight on our budgets, so some days I even skipped meals, or I just relied on cheap fast food.”

Palanisamy is an international student and took a marketing class. That’s where he came up with the idea to create an app that will help students and others who rely on food donations to improve their nutrition. 

He came up with the NourishU AI app, which uses artificial intelligence to find healthy recipes with whatever options someone might have at their disposal. 

The National Institutes of Health stated that only 19% of college students in the U.S. eat a balanced diet. 

Palanisamy said with NourishU AI, that could improve. You can take a picture with your phone of your food product, and the app does the rest. 

“I say add to my pantry,” he said. “It’s gonna move it to my actual kitchen, and then from here, I can generate recipes.”

NourishU also takes your information, like height and weight, allergy concerns, and dietary preferences, to help find a recipe that works for you. 

CSU Long Beach student Amit Kumar co-founded the app and works on the technical operations. The AI-app can pick up on any recipe available on the internet, even in real time. 

“For example, some Mexican mom created some food, which was new to the world,” Kumar said. “Our model is able to proceed with that recipe also, because it will go on the internet on a today basis, and take the recipe from there.”

Around 75% of college students skip meals because of a lack of time, according to the National Institutes of Health. NourishU helps to solve that problem by including recipes that can be cooked quickly. 

“The app is like, ok, you have 5 minutes of time,” said. Riya Bhatia, who’s also a founder of NourishU and a student at CSU Long Beach. “I’m going to give you a two-step recipe.”

As AI continues to evolve and become more mainstream, businesses have been slow to adopt the technology. Roughly 14% of U.S. businesses have fully adopted the technology, according to a report by Yahoo! Finance. 

Wade Martin is a professor of economics at CSU Long Beach and the director of the Institute for Innovations and Entrepreneurship. He said he’s encouraging college students to embrace AI.

“What we focus on is how to leverage it,” Martin said. “Create something worthwhile, create something that’s going to help benefit society.”

That’s what Palanisamy said he’s aiming to do.

He wants people who might not have access to healthy food options to see what they can do with their options in order to eat a more balanced diet.

“Government food banks, pantries, third-party charitable programs, food banks and make sure all the pantry users are effectively utilized by the people,” he said. “And turn them into healthy nutrition.”