Periodic Table of Food fills ‘black box’ of data on food composition

What’s in an apple? It’s a simple question that seems to grow more complex the more you think about it. But what comprises an apple — or any food, really — is at the core of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative. The project posits that knowing more about the biomolecular composition of food can help address the world’s most pressing human and planetary health challenges, from climate change to malnutrition to biodiversity loss. PTFI looks to analyze food composition data to uncover “the black box of the linkages between food and health,” Selena Ahmed, global director of the initiative at the American Heart Association, told Devex. The initiative, which launched in 2022, aims to create an open-access platform to support molecular analyses of food items, as well as develop standardized tools for identifying the diverse components in food. It is also providing scientific and educational resources for researchers, scientists, policymakers, and consumers, including tools, data sets, and training. PTFI is spearheaded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with help from a global network of partners including the American Heart Association and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. Rockefeller and other funders have given more than $30 million, while the American Heart Association and the Alliance of Biodiversity and CIAT co-facilitate its secretariat. PTFI launched a series of new tools last month. Though an estimated 26,000 biomolecules occur in plants, the vast majority remain unidentified and their potential impacts on health are unknown. The initiative will create a database of food compounds, providing standardized data on the biomolecular composition of an initial dataset of 500 foods. Its research will also help generate evidence of the effects of climate change and the impact of “agricultural solutions, such as regenerative agriculture, on food quality to inform agricultural guidelines and policies,” Ahmed said. Healthy people, healthy planet Among the goals of identifying food components is to better understand their functions in ecosystems and human health. The initiative hopes to inform “more precise dietary guidelines and other healthcare resources to promote healthy, sustainable, accessible, and culturally relevant diets,” said Ahmed. “The target is to be able to draw that whole line from planetary to human health and say [that] when we grow our food better, we actually make food that’s better for people,” said John de la Parra, director of global food portfolio at the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation suggests that as food biomolecules are identified and better understood, doctors will be able to prevent or resolve illnesses — for example, by advising patients on the best diet for their individual nutritional or health needs. Empirical data on food is essential to answering key questions about our nutrition and health, de la Parra noted. “There are tens of thousands of compounds and food that we just don’t see. It’s often called the ‘dark matter’ of food,” he said. “If you could look at what’s in your food, and then you could look at what’s in human blood, you can actually start to build a spectrum of what we eat and how it impacts human health.” Ahmed notes that diet-related chronic disease, for example, is increasingly understood to be driven by patterns of food intake based on biomolecular composition, rather than deficiency of a single nutrient. Standardizing the data For de la Parra, standardizing the way food composition data is analyzed in labs around the world will improve understanding of the potential impact of regenerative agriculture on nutrients and crop diversity. Regenerative agriculture describes farming practices focused on improving the health of soil that has been degraded through heavy machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides. At the moment, because food data is not standardized, it’s not possible to analyze and compare an apple in Nairobi and an apple in the United States due to variability in methodologies, he said. Questions may also arise about the composition of an apple depending on whether it is processed or contains added preservatives. “So if I were to produce this food regeneratively or through agroecological means, might it have more nutrient density or different chemical makeup than of food that is produced conventionally?” he asked. Until we have a standardized way of looking at food from all over the world, we can’t really answer those questions, he said. The knowledge that the PTFI is uncovering will be translated through the Food EDU platform for health care practitioners, launched last month, which provides scientific training. This includes a fellowship program made up of 40 to 50 scholars finishing master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, or postdoctorals from around the world — seven of them in the global south. Scholars participating in the initiative are asked what are the key questions in their communities that could be answered with the suite of tools the PTFI has developed — often called foodomics, or the study of the comprehensive chemistry of food. “We want these to be community-driven questions,” de la Parra said. The research centers where the scholars work, as well as a growing network of National Lab Hubs, contribute to the initiative’s global goals — mapping the planet's “edible biodiversity” to fuel data-driven solutions that advance well-being — through local and regional efforts. Tasting the rainbow So far, 500 different kinds of foods have been analyzed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, consisting of data scientists and analytical chemists, along with experts in agriculture and food, public health, and nutrition. “We have found a lot of unknown compounds and many known compounds,” said Maya Rajasekharan, PTFI director of strategy integration and engagement and managing director for Africa at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. The data collected can be analyzed using artificial intelligence to identify and understand underlying patterns. As well as researching the components of food, in the next phase of the project PTFI will also try to create interfaces for the data that are more user-friendly and accessible. Translating the data in this way could help show the importance of crop diversification. She notes an overreliance on a handful of crops worldwide — just 15 crops account for 90% of the energy intake globally. So diversity is increasingly important as climate change increases food insecurity worldwide and reduces the available nutrients in some crops. “Diversification of our food systems is critically important for building resilience and adaptation to climate change. So, we need to diversify what’s in our farms and the field, and what we eat,” she said. It’s long been said that a diverse, “rainbow-colored” plate of food is good, she said, and PTFI offers a chance to explain through science why it matters.