Giulia Menichetti

@menicgiulia.bsky.social

166 Followers 46 Following

Physicist & Network Scientist 👩‍🔬 now diving into the chemical complexity of food @harvardmed.bsky.social Mass General Brigham

Example instance from the Open Food Facts dataset used in the training of the predictive models. The product name, ingredient list, and full nutrient panel (not fully shown here) are used to construct the input sentences for the LLM-based models. The nutrient panel shown includes the 11 nutrients used to train the FoodProX-based models. The last two quantitative indicators are used in the explanatory models. The number of additives is also included as an additional feature in one variant of the FoodProX model.
The dark matter of nutrition. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has systematically measured 188 nutritional components that encompass essential micro- and macronutrients related primarily to energy intake and vitamin deficiencies. Although this knowledge has been transformative for the health sciences, these nutritional components represent only a fraction of the more than 139,000 chemicals we have collected, many of which have documented effects. For example, the 69 nutrients documented by the USDA Standard Reference Legacy database for raw garlic include vitamins such as ascorbic acid and amino acids such as alanine but miss important bioactive compounds such as allicin, ajoene, and p-coumaric acid. The number of health effects/bioactivities documented in FooDB is shown for each compound.
Nutrient composition of food. According to the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, the consumption of 100 g of raw onion delivers 45 nutritional components, whose amounts (measured in grams) span eight orders of magnitude. Among these 45 nutrients are compounds from different chemical classes, such as copper (a mineral), linoleic acid (a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid, the most typical isomer of fatty acid 18:2), and quercetin (a flavonol). We rank the nutrients in onion in descending order of concentration on the ordinate axis. The gram amount of nutrient n per 100 g is reported as xn.