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Nutrient concentrations in food display universal behaviour

Nature Food volume 3, pages 375–382 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Extensive programmes around the world endeavour to measure and catalogue the composition of food. Here we analyse the nutrient content of the full US food supply and show that the concentration of each nutrient follows a universal single-parameter scaling law that accurately captures the eight orders of magnitude in nutrient content variability. We show that the universality is rooted in the biochemical constraints obeyed by the metabolic pathways responsible for nutrient modulation, allowing us to confirm the empirically observed scaling law and to predict its variability in agreement with the data. We propose that the natural nutrient variability in food can be quantitatively formalized. This provides a mathematical rationale for imputing missing values in food composition databases and paves the way towards a quantitative understanding of the impact of food processing on nutrient balance and health effects.

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Fig. 1: Nutrient composition of food.
Fig. 2: The nutrient content across the food supply.
Fig. 3: Metabolic origins of nutrient scaling.

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Data availability

The raw data are available at https://github.com/menicgiulia/FoodLaws. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The processing codes are available at https://github.com/menicgiulia/FoodLaws.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by NIH grant no. 1P01HL132825, American Heart Association grant no. 151708, ERC grant no. 810115-DYNASET and Rockefeller Foundation grant no. 2019 FOD 026. We thank J. Loscalzo for useful discussions and insights on enzyme kinetics, as well as M. Sebek and S. Ofaim for helping with the chemical classification and disambiguation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Network Science Institute and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Giulia Menichetti & Albert-László Barabási

  2. Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Giulia Menichetti & Albert-László Barabási

  3. Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Albert-László Barabási

Authors
  1. Giulia Menichetti
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Contributions

G.M. and A.-L.B. conceived the project and wrote the manuscript. G.M. performed the data query, data integration, statistical analysis and analytical calculations.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Albert-László Barabási.

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Competing interests

A.-L.B. is the founder of Scipher Medicine and Naring Health, companies that explore the use of network-based tools in health, and Datapolis, which focuses on urban data.

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Nature Food thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–11, Figs. 1–22 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Nutrient values for PDFs and scaling laws.

Source Data Fig. 2

Extensive nutrient values for PDFs and scaling laws.

Source Data Fig. 3

KM values for PDFs and scaling laws.

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Menichetti, G., Barabási, AL. Nutrient concentrations in food display universal behaviour. Nat Food 3, 375–382 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00511-0

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