Computational physicist Giulia Menichetti is looking for “dark matter” in our food. In addition to known macronutrients, vitamins and minerals, the things we eat contain a whole world of natural chemicals we have no idea about. And those chemicals may affect our health.
“They have the ability to interact, to bind to human proteins, to modulate our microbiome,” says Menichetti of Harvard Medical School. “We want to leverage this to talk more and more about the role of food and nutrition in human health.”
Menichetti leads Foodome, a project to map our food’s full chemical complexity. Her team uses AI to mine scientific papers for every chemical compound that has ever been linked to a food. She singles out ones that haven’t been tracked by epidemiological studies — the “nutritional dark matter.” So far, her team has cataloged about 140,000 molecules.
When one hears about chemicals in food, they might initially think of artificial additives. Her team addresses those, but she’s also interested in naturally occurring chemicals. Take garlic, for example. Foodome has cataloged almost 7,000 different molecules in raw garlic alone. Some of these compounds have been investigated for health effects, but some are entirely new.
Foodome is still mining the scientific literature for these molecules and building out databases. Eventually, Menichetti would like AI to be able to predict how all these food molecules interact together and in the human body.
“There is a legacy of chemical complexity that comes from organisms that are all around us,” she says. “Food is part of that. It is actually our way to interact with our environment. We need to study it better.”
