# Nutrition Data Infrastructure for the AI Era: Operationalizing FAIR for Agent-Mediated Research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10363 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10363/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [NutriBench: A Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models on Nutrition Estimation from Meal Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12843/) (2024)
- [NGQA: A Nutritional Graph Question Answering Benchmark for Personalized Health-aware Nutritional Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15547/) (2024)
- [A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07051/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents can accelerate nutrition research, but their analyses inherit the identity, semantic, and release ambiguities of the underlying data. We present Nutrition Data Service (NDS), source-preserving infrastructure that operationalizes FAIR for automated use: description resolution makes release-specific records findable; typed crosswalks connect independently released resources; machine-readable interfaces expose versioned sources and crosswalks, supporting replayable and auditable analyses. On food-description benchmarks, NDS outperforms the best published language-model result on NutriBench. External and blinded crosswalk evaluations show that its typed contract favors defensible links and rejects unsupported mappings. In a person-level glycemic-index analysis, pinned NDS inputs produce identical outputs across models and repeated runs, while open-web reconstruction remains unstable. Together, these results show that agent-mediated nutrition research requires a new infrastructure that makes data identity, search, and crosswalk policy explicit.