Related papers: What is the optimal anthropoid primate diet?
We introduce the \emph{frugal foraging} model in which a forager performs a discrete-time random walk on a lattice, where each site initially contains $\mathcal{S}$ food units. The forager metabolizes one unit of food at each step and…
Diet design for vegetarian health is challenging due to the limited food repertoire of vegetarians. This challenge can be partially overcome by quantitative, data-driven approaches that utilise massive nutritional information collected for…
By 2050, the global population will exceed 9 billion, demanding a 70% increase in food production. Animal proteins alone may not suffice and contribute to global warming. Alternative proteins such as legumes, algae, and insects are being…
Recent progresses in data-driven analysis methods, including network-based approaches, are revolutionizing many classical disciplines. These techniques can also be applied to food and nutrition, which must be studied to design healthy…
In this essay written with my students and collaborators in mind, I share simple recipes that are easy and often fun to put in practice and that make a big difference in one's life. The seven guiding principles are: (1) sleep, (2) love and…
Foraging and acquiring of food is a delicate balance between managing the costs, both energy and social, and individual preferences. Previous research on the solitary foraging of free ranging dogs showed that they prioritized the…
Runners competing in races are looking to optimize their performance. In this paper, a runner's performance in a race, such as a marathon, is formulated as an optimal control problem where the controls are: the nutrition intake throughout…
Throughout history, for reasons of health, well known personalities have opted not to eat to satiety - to under-eat - with known benefits. Here, for the benefits of under-eating a very simple explanation is offered and discussed in some…
This study aims to optimize meal planning for nutritional health and cost efficiency using linear programming. Linear optimization provides an effective framework for addressing the problem of an optimal diet, as the composition of food can…
World food supply is crucial to the well-being of every human on the planet in the basic sense that we need food to live. It also has a profound impact on the world economy, international trade and global political stability. Furthermore,…
We study the dynamics of a \emph{myopic} forager that randomly wanders on a lattice in which each site contains one unit of food. Upon encountering a food-containing site, the forager eats all the food at this site with probability $p<1$;…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
A principle of evolutionary adaptation is applied to the Lotka--Volterra models, in particular to the food webs. We present a relatively simple computational algorithm of optimization with respect to a given criterion. This algorithm boils…
Terrestrial ecosystems are generally green and only a small part (<10%) of the plant matter is consumed by herbivores annually,but the reason has been unclear due to the lack of food web models for predicting the absolute herbivore biomass…
Obesity, the leading cause of many non-communicable diseases, occurs mainly for eating more than our body requirements and lack of proper activity. So, being healthy requires heathy diet plans, especially for patients with comorbidities.…
In this work, we consider partial consumption of food by a forager in presence of a threshold energy level. The forager considered here can survive for $S$ steps without food, namely the survival time. The threshold limits the consumption…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
We introduce an idealized model of an intelligent forager in which higher intelligence corresponds to a larger spatial range over which the forager can detect food. Such a forager diffuses randomly whenever the nearest food is more distant…