The Food and Health Disruption
In a world of constant innovation, is our food keeping up with the times? Our relationship with food is one as old as history, dating back to the rise of civilization when early humans discovered how to grow enough food to sustain ever-increasing populations. However, humanity has come a long way from early agriculture, and our modern practices of food production and consumption have changed much faster than our own biology. While our bodies may function as if we were still hunter-gatherers, the fact of the matter is that we live in a world where highly processed, minimally nutritious foods are available to us at the tap of a screen. Simply put, our food habits have outpaced our bodies’ capacities to deal with what we consume, resulting in a global health crisis. Yet, the root of this issue may also be its cure: food itself. Modern perspectives in food science champion the idea of “food as medicine,” that tailoring food to prevent the onset of disease or target symptoms of conditions will be as effective as any pharmaceutical solutions. This new way of thinking about the interplay between food, science, and health will drive innovation in these spaces — an emerging food and health disruption.
In the past, how have we tailored food to better suit our health?
Even without detailed knowledge of the chemical reactions that happen during cooking, civilizations throughout history have been able to modify their foods to maximize health benefits. One example of this practice is nixtamalization, a process used by many cultures dating back as early as 1400 B.C., in which maize was treated by boiling it with either soda ash or slaked lime to release vitamin B3. While cooking, the high pH of the water would break down components of the maize kernel that would otherwise be undigestible, releasing the stored vitamin B3 within and making it available for the body to absorb. It is important to note that regions that had diets rich in corn and maize but did not utilize this practice would often suffer from increased instances of pellagra, a vitamin B3 deficiency that could result in death if untreated.
An added benefit of this process is that the high pH and temperature necessary for nixtamalization break down harmful fungi that cause liver damage in adults and developmental issues in children. Through this specific process, multiple cultures worldwide were not only able to improve their vitamin consumption but also minimize the risk of disease, ultimately improving their health and well-being.
What within our bodies is driving the global health crisis?
Recall the earlier statement “our food habits have outpaced our biology”: how exactly did this happen? To understand our present health crisis, we must first look back at the past. During the period of early human evolution, it is likely that food was not consistently available to people the way it is today: this created systems in our bodies to store extra calories when there was a surplus of food in anticipation of times when food was in short supply. This resulted in what we know now as fat, which allowed the body to make use of previously stored energy. Accumulation of fat is also thought to have increased the chances of survival during pregnancy and childbirth, given the need to feed both the mother and newborn when food was not readily available, potentially contributing to its prevalence to this day. The storage of excess food as fat certainly presented an evolutionary advantage in the distant past; however, in most parts of the world, the way we access and eat food today is far from the reality of early humanity. Now, a combination of carbohydrate-rich diets and increasingly sedentary lifestyles have created the perfect storm of turning our bodies against us, as they continue to store calories for the starvation that may never come.
The overconsumption of refined carbohydrates results in a group of conditions known collectively as metabolic syndrome. In and of itself, metabolic syndrome presents an increased risk for multiple health problems, among them cardiovascular disease, stroke, and type II diabetes. However, the underlying conditions that give rise to metabolic syndrome are increasing in frequency as well, such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar levels, high blood cholesterol, abdominal obesity, and others. To be considered “metabolically fit,” one must have healthy levels for each of the above conditions, but the number of individuals that meet these criteria is strikingly low, as only one in every 12 Americans is metabolically fit. While we have a collective general awareness of the risks and occurrence of metabolic syndrome, this statistic is ringing alarm bells across multiple disciplines: from genetics to public health, all fields now see the pressing need to address this health crisis.
What can science tell us about how food affects health?
As society progresses, so does science. Today we are seeing major scientific advancements, growth in scale, and a fine-tuning in focus allowing us to better understand how nutrition improves our health, all the way down to the molecular level. Take sugars, as an example: while overconsumption of processed foods containing high-fructose corn syrup is a direct contributor to metabolic syndrome, a specific class of sugars is critical for early development. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), a type of sugar molecules consumed in the form of breast milk, have been discovered to be vital for brain and immune development during infancy, and the lack of which has serious implications for the infant’s health through adulthood. Considering the role of HMOs, it would be unfair to slander “sugar” as a whole; instead, this serves as an example of how advancements in molecular nutrition might help us curate our diet more carefully — allowing us to pick beneficial foods and exclude those that might increase our risk of disease.
On the other end of the human lifespan, molecular nutrition can also help us address conditions associated with aging. When fasting, our bodies begin to break down fat, which is then processed by the liver to create a class of chemicals called ketone bodies. While our bodies normally run on sugar (i.e., glucose), ketone bodies are responsible for fueling our brain during periods of prolonged fasting, a phenomenon most leveraged by the ketogenic diet. Ketone bodies are also known to improve brain health and prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease. These conditions occur when the brain experiences complications at the molecular level, which can further be connected to lower levels of cellular energy, which is where the food we eat and the air we breathe is turned into energy for our cells to help us with everything we do. In some cases, glucose metabolism, the process that provides cells with energy to function and survive, can be disrupted long before you see any symptoms; yet it has been shown that even after the diagnosis of related diseases, our body’s ability to utilize ketone bodies for high-energy-demand organs remains unchanged. In support of this, diets supplemented with ketone-rich foods such as eggs, cheese, meat, poultry, seafood, nuts, etc., can help to prevent these diseases and are expected to help maintain cognitive ability well throughout the natural aging process. Through advancements in scientific research, we now have the ability to study the effects of nutrition on our health, opening a promising avenue to future means of tailoring our food to best serve our bodies.
What would it take to go from research project to retail product?
While science helps to increase our technical understanding of the relationship between food and health, being able to translate research into a marketable product or service is an entirely different matter. A general area of science, known as “basic research,” is focused on investigating how things work and identifying different elements in a system that control and affect its entirety. This can encompass things like the effects of HMOs on early development in humans, improved infant formula or even dietary supplements; however, this knowledge is till several steps away from becoming realized as an actual product. This is where use-inspired research comes into play: a guiding framework for considering the needs of future users when conducting scientific research. For example, something like a store-bought diagnostic kit would not only be analyzed by researchers looking to observe specific health characteristics, but also by market experts to create a product that could be manufactured and meet the needs of consumers. By incorporating the intent of innovation early in the research process, use-inspired research can accelerate the translation of scientific findings into products and services that become available on market shelves.
The human element is also another barrier to bringing research to the public. As one might imagine, scientists who have trained for years in molecular biology and mass spectrometry are specialized in these fields and might not know how to assess the usefulness of their work or how to market it properly. On the other hand, business leaders might not know which ketone bodies are best utilized by the brain, or how we might enzymatically synthesize human milk oligosaccharides. With knowledge gaps on both sides of the use-inspired research spectrum, bridging the two disciplines will help complement each other’s skill sets. By fostering communication and mutual understanding between researchers and investors, talent development for early-career professionals can help bring both much-needed scientific expertise into the industry as well as business skills into science, with the aim of maximizing innovation from this collaboration.
Finally, unidentified and untapped interests exist across the spectrum of consumer demand. This creates a need for market discovery, an activity that identifies prospective customers and early adopters of new technologies or knowledge that comes from the collaboration between science and commercialization. Consumer behaviors drive this process and define how scientific findings move out of the lab and onto market shelves. In addition to prospective customers, companies and groups working within related markets also define how we can incorporate new scientific findings into innovative technologies to bring new products and services to consumers. Approaching market discovery in this manner will be crucial in not only introducing products from the collaborative efforts of scientists and investors, but also in ensuring their continued availability and development in our ever-changing world.
As the food and health disruption continues to grow, we at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at UC Davis are committed to bridging the gap between research and commercialization. In collaboration with research groups and industry leaders, we facilitate cross-training of early career scientists and drive innovation across the fields of use-inspired research, talent development, and market discovery. Advances in modern research science are signaling a change in the way we think about the relationship between food and human health, and the IIFH and our partners will be at the forefront of this disruption, striving for healthier, happier, and longer lives for all.
Adapted from “The Food and Health Disruption” white paper.
