Most of us feel we have a reasonable sense of what is in the food we eat. Is that confidence justified?
Not really, but I don’t think most people stop to question it deeply. We eat multiple times a day and assume we understand the nutritional content of what we’re consuming. Around 150 nutrients are routinely and systematically measured in food – the compounds that show up on nutrition labels or in national food composition databases.
But when you apply advanced analytical technology that allows you to look at everything present in a food, you find tens of thousands of biomolecules. Many of them have not been named, and we don’t know what they do.
There’s vastly more ‘dark matter’ in food than material we can currently measure and understand
There is, in the language of science, vastly more ‘dark matter’ in food than there is material we can currently measure and understand. That gap is precisely what the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) exists to close, through deep analytical profiling of every edible species on the planet. The PTFI is an initiative of The Rockefeller Foundation, owned by its affiliated public charity, RF Catalytic Capital.
Why has nutritional science left so much undiscovered for so long? Was the field simply not asking the right questions?
Over the past hundred years, nutritional science has been largely focused on understanding essential nutrients and what humans need to consume to make sure we’re not nutrient-deficient. And in that respect, the field has done an excellent job.
What is still in progress is the other half of the equation: What compounds should we consume more of, or less of? What nutrients may not be essential but actively promote or undermine optimal health – for both humans and the planet?
Advanced analytical platforms that look far deeper into food composition can now answer that question: technology and scientific ambition have finally converged.
What kinds of discoveries might this deeper analysis yield, and what are you hoping to find?
We equate it to exploring deep space. While we don’t know exactly what we’ll find, we have strong reason to believe that there are many more bioactive compounds in foods – the molecules that influence human physiology in meaningful ways – waiting to be identified, named and understood.
Once we truly know what is in food, we’ll be able to make much better recommendations for how to grow and prepare it, and which diets are appropriate for which people in which circumstances. Right now, we’re largely working with averages and approximations. The PTFI is building the foundation for something far more comprehensive that will augment what we know and how we make decisions about food, nutrition, agriculture, and health.
You mentioned preparation as a variable. How significant is that? Can the journey from farm to fork meaningfully change what a food actually does in the body?
Think about the full journey a food item takes: growing practices, harvest timing, the effects of climate and precipitation, geographic location, storage, shipping, packaging and how it is cooked. Then consider the biology of the individual who actually consumes it, as we each have unique metabolic characteristics and nutritional needs.
Every one of those variables can affect the biomolecular profile of what is delivered to the body. The same apple variety grown in two different locations at two different times of year can have a strikingly different composition. This is not a small margin of variation. It looks to be substantial enough to matter for health outcomes, and we’re only beginning to quantify it.
Should we still be telling our children to ‘eat your greens’?
Our data shows that ten different green vegetables share only a very small number of common compounds. The vast majority of the compounds are unique to each specific plant. So when we lump them together as ‘greens’ and encourage people to eat more of them, we’re missing something important – diversity – which exposes your body to a far wider range of biomolecules.
So whilst the principle of ‘eat your green veggies’ is great, we should really be saying ‘eat as many different green veggies and as many different fruits as you possibly can’.
Q: What does your work mean for ‘Food Is Medicine’ – presumably PTFI’s work offers the movement vital scientific rigour?
When a pharmaceutical company develops a drug, the level of scrutiny is extraordinary because you need to know precisely what you are delivering to a patient before you can understand its effects. Increasingly, researchers around the country are researching how ‘Food Is Medicine’ programs – like medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions – benefit health in rigorous, clinical-style trials.
PTFI believes that food can be powerful medicine and that we can apply the same level of diligence and scrutiny to understanding the makeup of the food we eat. Once we’re able to tie specific food components to specific metabolic responses and specific health outcomes, we will scientifically understand the pathway for how food can improve a person’s health or alleviate various ailments, and we will then be able to optimise Food is Medicine programs even further.
Who is behind the PTFI, and how is it structured globally?
The PTFI is a global participatory initiative. The Rockefeller Foundation was the founding funder and continues to support the work. The co-secretariats managing the project are the American Heart Association – a global leader in human and clinical health – and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, which is a global leader in agricultural research. Having those two institutions jointly steward this initiative is genuinely unprecedented, and it reflects the scale of what we’re trying to do.
Beneath that structure, we are building a growing network of laboratories distributed across the world – around 35 labs at present, with at least one on every continent except Antarctica. Rather than asking researchers to ship food samples to a single central lab, we’ve developed standardised analytical platforms and methods that can be deployed locally. That means each lab can analyse those foods that are most culturally and regionally significant in their context, such as local staples, underutilised crops and traditional preparations, and then upload the resulting data into a centralised data processing pipeline and shared database.
The goal was always to build global capacity rather than centralise everything. Seeing data come from Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere – foods and preparations that have never been characterised at this level – is one of the most exciting aspects of the project.
There is growing political attention on food in the US right now. Is the PTFI benefiting from that shift in focus?
The PTFI’s position is deliberately objective, but we are encouraged by the increased attention on what’s in our food supply and how to make it more accessible and healthier. It creates an environment where the work we’re doing is more visible and more directly relevant to policy conversations.
We measure what we find, and we make that data available regardless of whether it is commercially convenient. Whether the findings are flattering or unflattering for particular foods or industries, our commitment is to transparency. It is then for the scientific, clinical, and policy communities to engage with the data and decide what to do with it. We don’t tell people what to eat – we give the world a much clearer picture of what they’re actually eating.
What’s your vision for the long term? If the PTFI succeeds in its mission, what changes?
The scope and the potential of where the data can take us get bigger every day. At the most fundamental level, we believe it could drive a complete rethink of how we organise farming: what we grow, where we grow it, how we support farmers, how we structure agricultural subsidies, and how we think about getting food from producer to consumer.
The shift in mindset we’re working toward is from ‘delivering calories to people’ to ‘delivering specific biomolecules that support health’. Those are very different objectives, and they lead to very different decisions all the way through the food system.
There is also the planetary dimension. Everything we grow to eat has an impact on the soil, on water use, and on the broader environment. We have an opportunity to rethink farming not just as a matter of what we extract from the earth, but what we contribute back. The PTFI’s vision includes training the next generation of farmers to see themselves as stewards of both human health and planetary health simultaneously.
Is there a sense of urgency in the work – a feeling that the current trajectory of how we eat is genuinely unsustainable?
Personally and institutionally, yes. Eating food is one of the few things that almost every human being on earth does every single day. Every meal is either an opportunity to support health or to undermine it. There is almost nothing else we do with that frequency and that degree of physiological consequence.
The urgency I feel is not just about the science; it is about the gap between what we’re learning and what is currently reaching people in a form they can act on. We can generate extraordinary data about the complexity of food and its relationship to health, but if that knowledge stays in journals and databases, it won’t translate into better food education, better public health guidance, better agricultural policy, and more accessible, healthier food.
There is a disconnect, especially in places like the US, between what we know about nutrition and what we eat on a daily basis. People running between meetings and grabbing something convenient and affordable aren’t connecting those decisions to the deeper conversation about what food does to the body.
Closing that gap requires education. We’re working in collaboration with a programme called Food EDU, to build accessible, evidence-based food education for the global community.
I believe the education and the scientific piece are both critical and urgent.
The Q&A has been trimmed and slightly paraphrased so you can scroll through it quickly, but you can hear the full interview below – and we recommend you do!
Dr Tracy Shafizadeh talks to Metabolica
Dr Tracy Shafizadeh was interviewed for Metabolica on 16th March 2026
The Periodic Table of Food Initiative
