by In the period after the genome, the food we eat is the next largest predictor for our health and network science, and AI can help to decipher this connection to prevent and treat diseases caused by our diet.
Network science and artificial intelligence can identify food molecules that have a negative impact on health and relieve diseases by suggesting dietary changes, says a northeastern expert.
Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, Albert-László Barabási-a Resthetic Professor of Physics at Northeastern University and director of the Center for Complex Network Research-Die Network Science has used connections between proteins in human cells. “Network medicine comes into play here,” says Barabási.
Finally, network medicine will be able to issue personalized nutritional recommendations and treatments based on genetics, nutrition and the stage of illness of an individual.
Genes define proteins, he says, and diseases occur when a gene mutates.
“Mutations change the protein in the network, which then changes the network itself,” he says.
However, genetic changes can only explain a fraction of the diseases, says Barabási.
“Depending on the illness, from a few percent of cases,” he says.
The remaining causes of lifestyle, including stress, movement, sleep and the environment, whereby the food is the most important factor.
When Barabási recognized this and integrated the nutrition into network medicine about a decade ago – an area that he named in 2007 and uses network science on biological systems to understand and develop illnesses.
This research has led to a number of scientific work on topics that range from the definition of the “dark matter” of nutrition to the discovery of universal laws of chemical concentration in food and the measurement of the degree of food processing.
The highlight of this work is a new overview article “Decoding the foodoma: molecular networks that combine diet and health”, published in the annual overview of nutrition. It shows how Network Science and AI can appear how food molecules affect health and illness.
When food molecules enter the bloodstream and reach cells, some are used for energy, says Barabási, while others can bind to cell proteins or DNA and influence biological processes. These molecules can either block or accelerate certain processes.
Initially, Barabási assumed that the mapping of the interactions of food molecules with human cells would be uncomplicated. To his surprise, he and his team found that scientists had only identified a limited number of chemical components of food.
The US Agricultural Ministry has 150 essential micro and macronutrients that mainly use energy consumption and metabolism, including fatty acids, amino acids, sugar, fibers, minerals and vitamins. It has expanded its list to 188 components since 2003, including some flavonoid plants that are responsible for colors that are antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immune enhancers.
“We have recognized many molecules in the food that know that health consequences are not included in this nutritional list,” says Barabási.
His team examined tens of thousands of food connections in Foodb, a comprehensive database in Canada, in which the chemical composition of food was described, which was largely overlooked by epidemiological studies. In 2019, they called these undetected molecules the “dark matter” of nutrition.
Since then, Barabási and his employees have put together a library with over 139,000 food molecules, which cancel themselves from special scientific literature, various databases, repositories for mass spectrometry and mass spectrometry experiments.
However, the underlying molecular mechanisms, through which the “dark matter” of nutrition influences human health, remain largely unexplored. The researchers argue that nutritional connections should not be examined in isolation, as was common in the 20th century, but in the context of their interactions.
Another discovery from Barabási’s laboratory affects ultra-processed food. They found that the relative conditions of concentrations of individual chemicals are consistent and predictable in various natural foods. According to Barabási, deviations from these conditions signal that the food has been processed.
“No matter which food you look at as long as there are natural ingredients, there will be relatively low variations from one food to the other,” he says. “The reason for this is that we and what we eat is really the same chemical engine in the end.”
According to Barabási, practically all ingredients of human nutrition were once living organisms that produced and regulated nutrients according to universal biochemical rules.
“These chemical engines cannot produce anything [with concentration of a certain chemical] 100 -more than normal because there are clear production restrictions, ”says Barabási. “Usually the difference is in a two or three times more [food item] compared to the other. “
Ultra-processed foods such as margarine, packaged bread, sweetened breakfast flakes or cookies usually have longer ingredients, including substances that are not used often in house food.
Food processing technology has dramatically preferred since the industrial revolution. Human biology and physiology, says Barabási, have not developed that much. It is believed that this misalignment contributes to modern diseases.
Food processing changes the natural nutrient concentration and often includes adding salt, sugar, fats and other additives to improve the taste and to mask unwanted properties. In the past ten years, epidemiological studies have associated ultra-processed food with higher risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and depression.
The exact underlying mechanisms remain unclear.
“We believe that the problem is most likely to be due to the chemical changes that process the processing,” says Barabási. “For example, it has chemicals that turn off the feeling of saturation. This is really mainly because we let more eat more. “
According to one of the studabási studies, over 73% of US food supply are ultra-processed.
“It shows up on the scale and the health problems with which we are confronted,” says Barabási.
His best advice on better health is to eat foods that our great-grandmothers would recognize as good if there were no ultra-processing processing.
Barabási is committed to a large project that combines AI, mass spectrometry and network medicine in order to map the chemical composition of the food we consumed.
He says the project is “feasible with the current technologies”.
With the right financing, Barabási estimates that scientists could uncover 50% to 60% of the “dark matter” of nutrition within five years, which is sufficient to cover more than 99% of the food consumed by us. The decoding of the remaining part can become more difficult and take longer.
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