What ’s in your food? A new research effort intends to find out

NEW YORK CITY— Humans eat more than 30,000 species of plants and animals. But for the most part we don’t know much about what is in them. Researchers have thoroughly analyzed the molecular components of only a few hundred of the most common foods, leaving a vast gap in our knowledge of nutrition. This week, food scientists and activists met here to launch a new database that aims to close that gap. The database, part of a project called the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), spearheaded by the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to document the vast array of biomolecules found in food, with a long-term goal of aiding efforts to improve agriculture, nutrition, and health. “Our planet has this incredible edible biodiversity,” Selena Ahmed, an ethnobotanist at Montana State University and global director of PTFI at the American Heart Association (AHA), said at the database’s unveiling on 24 April. But most compounds in the plants, meat, fish, and dairy products that we eat have never even been named and represent the “dark matter of food,” said Chi-Ming Chien, co-founder of Verso Biosciences, which is aiding in the effort. To dramatize the surprising molecular diversity in foods, Chien showed the results for one sample of quinoa. It contained 6000 distinct proteins, mostly designated by crypticstrings of numbers and letters. “This platform allows us to analyze the complexity of foods in a way that was simply not possible before,” he said...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research