This is a fantastic, simple, necessary, and powerful article.

It also encapsulates quite neatly my thoughts including reservations about the complexity ‘brand’. This is about purely scientific-realist level reductionist done better, at a more appropriate scale, with technical solutions. It’s about analysis which doesn’t recognise hierarchically-interacting effects or emergence. It mentions the microbiome, and differences between humans, which is good, but doesn’t even nod to the real layers of complexity in the system of human health related to food – I can understand not mentioning any of the effects of farming, supply chains, sustainability etc, since they operate at at least one remove – but the health effects of food cannot merely be reduced to interactions of molecules. Context, environment, epigenetics, attitude of mind, exercise are all a completely interacting part of the picture.

Maybe all that just isn’t appropriate for this kind of article, maybe that’s just the way science has to work – and the final long paragraph does suggest it’s not far from the authors minds:

To appreciate the transformative potential of a deeper quantitative understanding of the nutritional dark matter, we must realize that our genetic predispositions to specific phenotypes and pathophenotypes can conceivably be modified by these food-based molecules. Indeed, while we cannot currently change the genetic basis for disease, we regularly modulate the activity of our subcellular networks through the food we eat, diminishing the impact of some mutations and enhancing the role of others. This differential modulation of subcellular networks explains why individuals with strong genetic predispositions to heart disease can lower the chance of developing the disease by up to 70% with proper lifestyle choices⁵⁶, within which dietary changes play a dominant role^56,57. This finding implies that an accurate mapping of our full chemical exposure through our diet could lead to actionable information to improve health. Recent trends in nutrition research, aiming to explore the synergies, competitions and interactions among the entire matrix of what constitutes a food product, increasingly acknowledge the complexity of the problem, and the need for new tools to address it⁵⁸. We must embrace this irreducible complexity to be able to integrate changes in the food supply, the role of the microbiome and personalized dietary patterns, so that we can eventually offer individually tailored food-based therapies and appropriate lifestyle choices for disease prevention and lifespan optimization.

But I can’t help having a ‘so near, and yet so far’ response to this. It’s great, it’s essential, but it isn’t enough, it isn’t systemic enough, and it risks closing eyes to true complexity.

Source: The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet | Nature Food

Published: 09 December 2019