The food we eat is complex. Understanding its molecular makeup can seem even more so—but that understanding could be critical to the future of food and health. UC Davis’ Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) is contributing to The Periodic Table of Food Initiative’s (PTFI) global effort to better understand and connect our food system as one of nine Centers of Excellence worldwide, and the only one in North America. With PTFI, IIFH is leveraging our unique position and expertise at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to further advance the ability to characterize the molecular composition of foods and make that knowledge accessible and useful to both researchers and communities across the globe.
Connecting Production, Composition and Health
Food production, nutrition, health and sustainability have often been studied as separate questions. PTFI offers an opportunity to bring them closer together by examining food at the molecular level and asking how the way food is produced, processed and consumed may shape its composition and, ultimately, the questions researchers can investigate about its role in human and planetary health.
“Often, efforts in the food system are siloed to either understand sustainability of production practices or health impacts of products separately. Through the PTFI methodologies, we are building a direct connection between production practices and health outcomes for our favorite foods.” – Justin Siegel, Faculty Director of the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health and Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Molecular Medicine at UC Davis
IIFH has played a foundational role in making those connections possible and has developed the standardized methodology that now provides a common framework for PTFI research. That consistency matters: researchers need to be able to characterize foods using comparable approaches so that data generated across studies, food types and locations can ultimately be brought together into a broader picture of what food is made of.
Looking Beyond the Nutrition Label
Much of what we know about food has historically been organized around major nutrients and individual ingredients. But the foods we eat contain far more molecular complexity than a traditional nutrition label can capture.
“In order to be able to look at the complexity of diet and the complexity of outcomes. You have to be able to measure all the things in food as we consume them.” – Bruce German, Director of the UC Davis Foods For Health Institute
That principle is at the center of IIFH’s work with PTFI. By looking beyond individual nutrients, researchers can build a more complete picture of food and explore how its molecular composition connects to digestibility, health and sustainability.
One example is IIFH’s PTFI-supported research into protein-rich foods. Protein is an essential part of the human diet, but the molecular characteristics of proteins and other food components, and how those characteristics influence what happens when we consume them, remain incompletely understood. The project brings together food analytics, computational methods and health research to map the molecular composition of popular protein-rich foods and investigate relationships between those food characteristics and human responses.
The work also includes pilot dietary interventions designed to generate evidence about how specific molecular features of food may relate to digestion, nutrient availability and health. Over time, this type of research could help build a more detailed understanding of how the molecular composition of foods relates to the ways people experience and respond to them.
From how food is grown to what is on the plate
That same approach is being applied to one of the food system’s most important questions: how agricultural practices influence the food we ultimately eat.
Through another PTFI-supported project, IIFH researchers are examining foods produced using conventional and regenerative agricultural practices to determine how those approaches affect food quality and molecular composition. The research combines comprehensive molecular analysis with clinical dietary studies, machine learning and life-cycle assessment—an approach that evaluates environmental impacts across the food production system.
The goal is not simply to determine whether one production system is “better” than another. It is to generate the detailed evidence needed to understand tradeoffs and relationships between food composition, nutrient availability, human health and environmental sustainability.
Researchers are also working toward predictive models that could help identify combinations of food products that balance nutritional value and sustainability. In the future, this type of evidence could give food producers, product developers and chefs better information for designing foods and meals that meet both human and planetary health objectives.
This is where the broader potential of PTFI begins to emerge. The ability to characterize food more comprehensively is not an end in itself. It creates a foundation for connecting information that has traditionally been difficult to study together—and for translating that information into decisions about how food is grown, produced and consumed.
Building the Foundation for What Comes Next
The scientific opportunity extends beyond any single food, nutrient or production system. As researchers build increasingly detailed molecular maps of foods and connect those maps with agricultural, human and environmental data, we can begin to see the food system differently: not as a series of disconnected decisions from farm to fork, but as an interconnected system that can be measured and designed with greater precision.
With this comes critical questions: Can a better understanding of food composition help identify ways to improve nutritional quality while maintaining the characteristics people value in the foods they eat? Can molecular data help inform more sustainable approaches to producing and formulating foods? Can a deeper understanding of nutrient availability help producers design foods that better meet nutritional needs?
Answering those questions requires collaboration across disciplines. It will also require shared methods and high-quality data that researchers around the world can build on and translate into real-world decisions.
That is the opportunity at the heart of IIFH’s work with PTFI. By combining UC Davis expertise in food science, nutrition, health, analytics and agricultural systems with a globally connected research framework, the partnership is helping build the evidence and tools needed for the next generation of food-system innovation.
Understanding more about what food is made of is only the beginning. The larger opportunity is to use that knowledge to make the foods we love better for people and the planet.
Read more about PTFI’s centers of excellence
