Health: the right food, the right amount, for the right person

Status: experimental profile. Not part of Cookwala Core. See CORE.md section 10 for what is normative today.

Second mission pillar, next to ending hunger: make people healthier. The goal is to deliver the right food, cooked the right way, in the right amount, at the right time, for each person, at an exact and known cost, with as little waste as possible.

1. What Cookwala does #

Need	Mechanism
Know each person's needs	`PersonNutrition` profiles (age, sex, height, weight, activity, life stage, goals, conditions, allergies, intolerances, IDDSI texture, clinician-set targets). Sensitive, local-only; the public index rejects requests that contain them
Turn needs into numbers	Nutrition engine computes `NutritionTargets` per person (energy, macros, fiber, sodium, free sugars, micronutrients). Clinician targets always override computed ones
Choose the right dishes	`personalize` / `nutrition_target` / `feed` intents rank recipes by fit to everyone at the table at once, plus cost, waste, organic/local preference, variety, time and energy
Cook it the right way	Recipe patches for health goals: less salt (salt added at the end, per-person seasoning), healthier fats, steaming/baking instead of deep-frying, texture modification (IDDSI), low-FODMAP swaps; diet and allergen rules stay hard constraints
Serve the right amount	`PortionPlan`: grams per person per component, nutrients per portion, share of daily targets reached, per-person modifications
Exact cost	Ingredient cost from offers or prices (+ energy), per person
Least waste	Cook quantity factor so portions + planned leftovers are exact; leftovers get a storage plan and a next use; exact-quantity shopping; use-expiring-first ranking
Right food sources	`preferences.sourcing` (organic / local / seasonal: no_preference, prefer, require; certifications; max premium). Organic and other claims count only when backed by a verified credential on the offer
Right time	Meal schedule and fasting windows in the client profile; planner aligns serve times

2. Nutrition engine (how targets are computed) #

Adults, energy: Mifflin-St Jeor resting energy × activity factor, adjusted for the goal (e.g. a moderate deficit for weight loss, floored at safe minimums).
Children, adolescents, pregnancy, lactation, older adults: reference-value tables (national DRIs or WHO/EFSA tables), loaded as knowledge packs per country, not hard-coded formulas.
Population guidance used by default (overridable by packs and clinicians): sodium under WHO limits, free sugars under 10% of energy (WHO), fiber at reference intakes, and adult protein at about 0.8 g/kg (higher for older adults, athletes and recovery).
Recipe nutrition: the nutrition panel per serving (from the fifi estimates today, then computed per ingredient from USDA FoodData Central / national food composition tables), recalculated after every patch, scale and substitution. That's what makes portions exact.
Portioning: a small quadratic program per meal. It minimizes the deviation of each person's day from their targets, weighted by priority nutrients (e.g. sodium for hypertension). It's subject to the total cooked mass, minimum and maximum portion sizes, appetite, and component availability. The result is an integer gram allocation.

3. Guardrails #

Not medical advice. Medical conditions are used for filtering and for applying clinician-set targets. Cookwala never diagnoses, and never computes therapeutic diets (e.g. CKD, diabetes carbohydrate plans) without clinician input. Answers carry that warning.
Privacy: person data is sensitive, encrypted at rest on the hub, never in execution reports, and never shared with providers, extensions or the index unless the user grants it per extension (profiles.client.sensitive, off by default).
Kids, pregnancy, elderly, immunocompromised: stricter food-safety variants (CCP variants such as firm yolks; no raw-egg sauces; no high-risk foods per policy packs).
No shaming: weight goals are opt-in; the defaults are "maintain" and "eat well".
Equity: health features work in very_low budget and relief modes. Healthy doesn't mean expensive: legumes, whole grains and seasonal produce rank high on nutrition per cost.

4. Where it lives in the specs #

profile.schema.json#/$defs/PersonNutrition, #/$defs/NutritionTargets, ClientProfile.members, preferences.sourcing
advice.schema.json intent personalize, #/$defs/PersonalizeQuery, #/$defs/PortionPlan
Example: [examples/advice/personalize.request.json](../examples/advice/personalize.request.json) → [response](../examples/advice/personalize.response.json)
Implementation: reasoner nutrition engine and portioner (IMPLEMENTATION M3/M7). Country reference tables become knowledge packs (kind: nutrition, to add).