FRUITS

FRUITS is an application you can use to reconstruct diets based on the Bayesian stable isotope mixing model. More exactly, the utility makes estimations of food intake of all potential food groups and has applicability in various fields, such as archaeology, forensics or ecology.

More often than not, you have to account for a certain level of uncertainty when handling data. While this also applies to diet reconstruction, the platform allows you to handle the unknown sources by using prior expert information.

FRUITS has the capability to account for unknown dietary sources by measuring the contribution of different food fractions based on the chemical signals measured in certain tissues and those present in various food groups.

It is important to note that the measured signal reflects the fractions, such as fatty acids, amino acids or macronutrients for example, that are specific to certain food groups. Since the model is based on isotopic fractionation that occurs at different stages of the metabolic process, aspects like diet quality, body size or growth stage are also accounted for in the measurements.

Then again, to provide accurate estimations there are several prerequisites that need to be met first. More exactly, the accuracy of the predictions is directly proportional to the similarity between the proposed and real scenarios and the number of dietary proxies selected. It is ideal if the food groups used have considerably different chemical signatures.

In other words, for this application to provide you with reliable data, you need to have a good knowledge of the individual foods available for the subject as well as their composition and chemical signatures.

Using isotopic data, FRUITS can calculate the food intake and display the results in a box plot featuring the corresponding probability distribution.