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What if the food on your plate could be tailored to your body — taking into consideration your individual nutritional needs, how your body processes different foods and even what you like to eat?
That is the idea behind precision nutrition, an emerging field that brings together nutrition, agriculture, engineering, food science and technology to better understand how food affects individuals and how the food system can deliver healthier, safer and more sustainable food.
John Verboncoeur, a professor and senior associate dean of research in Michigan State University’s College of Engineering, serves on the executive committee and helped organize the National Science Foundation, or NSF, workshop for the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, or ERVA. The goal of ERVA is to examine the future of precision nutrition and the research needed to make it possible.
Jade Mitchell, a professor in the College of Engineering who also participated in the ERVA workshop, studies human risk analysis related to food safety.
Here, Verboncoeur and Mitchell explain precision nutrition, including what the future could look like, why the information on food labels doesn’t tell the whole story, and how engineering could help create a smarter, less wasteful food system.
Verboncoeur: Precision nutrition is about understanding that people don’t all respond to food in the same way.
Mitchell: The nutrition information on a food label tells you what is in the food, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you the nutrients your body will absorb. Your body chemistry also affects how you process food, and what you eat with a particular food can also have an impact on what your body takes in.
The goal of precision nutrition is to move beyond simply saying, “This food contains this much protein or this much vitamin,” and toward a smarter diet that understands what those nutrients mean for a particular person.
This isn’t about simply creating a personalized diet for each person, but rethink how we grow, process, package, track and consume food.
Mitchell: A food label gives us a number, but that number isn’t necessarily an exact representation of what every person will receive from eating that food.
Food itself also varies. Crops aren’t grown in perfectly controlled environments, so the nutritional content of a crop can change depending on growing conditions and other factors. Yet the food label presents a single number. Better measurement could eventually help us understand that variability and account for it. We can measure many of these things, so there’s an opportunity to develop a more sophisticated understanding of nutrition.
Then there is the question of what happens after we eat it. Your body chemistry, your microbiome and what else is on your plate can all affect how much of a nutrient you actually absorb. It’s not just “What does my body need?” It’s also “What exactly is in the food I’m eating?”
Verboncoeur: Personalized nutrition is based on your microbiome — the collection of microorganisms in your digestive system — which can differ from person to person and can change over time.
If we can understand those differences, we can eventually become much more precise about predicting what nutrients an individual person will absorb from different foods.
Verboncoeur: That’s one possible future.
Imagine being able to use information about your body and nutritional needs to determine which foods would be most beneficial to you and in what quantities.
Technology could help make that information practical. For example, your phone or another device could know what foods you have available in your fridge and pantry and help build meals around your nutritional needs, your preferences and the foods that need to be eaten before they spoil.
If you’re training for something such as a triathlon, your nutritional needs could change as you get closer to the event. Instead of guessing what you need, technology could eventually help you adjust your food choices based on those changing physical needs.
We’re not at the point where everyone can walk into a doctor’s office and receive a completely personalized diet, but the research is helping identify what we need to understand to eventually make that possible.
Verboncoeur: Engineering can provide tools to measure, monitor and manage what happens throughout the food system.
One example is smart food packaging. We can envision inexpensive sensors printed directly onto food packaging that monitor the quality or safety of the food. Milk, for example, becomes more conductive as it deteriorates because bacteria produce lactic acid.
A very inexpensive sensor could measure that change. A phone could then activate the sensor using technology like the technology already used for contactless payments and receive information about the food. Instead of relying solely on an expiration date — which is an estimate — consumers could eventually have more information about the actual condition of the food.
We are thinking about the food system from preharvest to table, and that there are many things happening in the supply chain besides simply time and temperature that aren’t always considered or shared.
Verboncoeur: Absolutely.
A huge amount of food is wasted because it is considered past its expiration date, even though some of it may still be safe and usable. If we could better determine the actual quality and safety of food, we could potentially redirect some food before it becomes waste. It could also help food producers and retailers make better decisions about which foods need to be sold or used first.
The same technology could help with food safety. If a food is contaminated, a digital record of its journey through the supply chain could help researchers and companies identify where different contaminated products crossed paths. Instead of removing an enormous amount of food from the market, it could become possible to identify much more precisely which products are affected.
Mitchell: Today, agricultural commodities are generally valued by weight. But if we’re interested in nutrition, we could eventually think differently about what we’re producing.
For example, instead of paying for a certain weight of carrots, we could think about the amount of beta-carotene those carrots contain.
That would create a different incentive for farmers: producing foods with higher nutritional value rather than simply producing more weight.
Shelf life could also become an important consideration because nutrients begin to degrade after food is harvested. Choosing crops with naturally longer shelf lives, along with better packaging, could help preserve nutritional value and reduce waste.
Verboncoeur: There are still significant gaps in our knowledge.
The purpose of the NSF work is to identify those gaps and determine where additional research could make the biggest difference. The vision is looking decades into the future, not suggesting that all of these technologies are ready for consumers today.
Mitchell: There are also important questions about affordability and access. If precision nutrition becomes possible but only wealthy people can afford it, we haven’t solved the larger problem.
We need to think about how these technologies can benefit everyone.
The affordability and accessibility of a smart diet is one of the challenges researchers need to consider now, not after technology is developed.
Verboncoeur: The world’s population is expected to approach 9 billion people by 2050, while food production is already placing enormous demands on water and other resources.
At the same time, a significant amount of the food we produce is wasted.
If we can use technology to understand what people need nutritionally, produce foods with greater nutritional value, preserve food longer, improve food safety and reduce waste, we can make the entire food system more efficient.
This is why precision nutrition isn’t just a nutrition problem. It’s an engineering problem, an agriculture problem, a food science problem and a supply chain problem.
Michigan State University is particularly well positioned to bring those disciplines together. We have expertise in engineering, agriculture, food science and supply chain management, and bringing those areas together could help us tackle the food challenges of the future.
Learn more about ERVA.
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