A new menu planning model for Malaysian secondary schools using optimization approach

Humans need to eat a good and balanced nutritious diet that provides calories for energy requirements and nutrients for proper growth, repair and maintenance of the body tissues. Moreover, it is essential for resisting and preventing diseases and infection that may lead to problems such as anemia, scurvy and rickets. In recent studies, medical researchers have discovered that good nutrition can help to reduce the risks of coronary heart disease and certain types of cancer. Menu and diet planners face tremendous challenges and difficulties in order to improve human health. Serving healthier meals is a major step towards achieving that objective. However, constructing and planning a nutritious and balanced menu manually is complicated, inefficient and time-consuming. The aim of this study is to develop a mathematical model for diet planning that meets the necessary nutrient intake for the secondary school student as well as minimizing a budget. The data were collected from various boarding schools and also from the Ministry of Education. Nutrition planning is a well-known optimization problem and the goal is to find the best possible optimal solution. Therefore the model was solved by using optimization method along with Integer Programming. This model can be adopted to solve other diet planning problems such as for the military, hospitals nursing home and universities.