Jun 20 (IPS) – This year, bee pollen has become a trendy superfood thanks to a wide range potential benefits. Last year, sea moss led the superfood trends. It was like that before turmeric.
Invariably, these newly celebrated superfoods are never new; they have long been consumed by non-Western cultures. The inadequate research into nutritional composition and health attributes almost always leads to a list of exaggerated benefits, from cancer prevention to overall vitality and longevity. They become a fad for a few years and then often take a back seat to the next ‘superfood’.
Globally, half of all calories come from some form of wheat, rice or corn, even though there are over 30,000 edible varieties on our planet.
Yet the frequent emergence of popular superfoods shows that food biodiversity persists in many communities and regions around the world. In a recent publication in Natural food, together with 54 colleagues, we started capturing and prioritizing this diversity, with a curated list of 1,650 foods.
Notably, more than 1,000 of the foods on the composite food list are not included in national food composition databases. In other words, we may not have easy access to what is in these foods, or science may not yet know what these foods contain. . This suggests that dietary guidelines based on national food composition databases miss most of humanity’s long and co-evolutionary history with food.
Furthermore, even the foods that are commonly consumed and included in national food composition databases are poorly understood. An estimated 95% of biomolecules in food are unknown to science – this is the “dark matter” of food, diets and biodiversity. We don’t know what these biomolecules are, or how they function in ecosystems and in our bodies.
Mapping this dark matter is too big a task for any one laboratory, organization or country to undertake alone. We need a united scientific movement, bigger than the human genome project, with governments and researchers around the world filling the gaps in our knowledge of the food we eat.
a suite This effort now has standardized tools, data and training available to build a centralized database based on standardized tools that allow researchers, practitioners and communities to share their wisdom and expertise on food and its diverse characteristics to provide solutions for our urgent social challenges.
Preliminary data from the first 500 foods Analysis shows that many ‘whole foods’ can be considered ‘superfoods’, containing more unique than common biomolecules. For example, each fruit and vegetable has a unique composition of biomolecules that varies based on the environment, processing and preparation.
Broccoli, which gained the status of ‘superfood’ a few years ago because of its… antioxidants and its connections gut healthcontains more than 900 biomolecules that are not found in other green vegetables.
We have identified the existence of these compounds through mass spectrometry, but we have not determined the properties of these unique metabolites – we don’t even have enough data to name them accurately, let alone understand the role they play. play in our bodies and in our bodies. ecosystems in the world as a whole.
And these more than 900 biomolecules – broccoli’s dark matter – complement the biomolecules broccoli shares with other cruciferous vegetables, which can help prevent a wide variety of diseases, from colon cancer and other forms of cancer Unpleasant vascular disease.
Diet-related diseases such as diabetes, some cancers and heart disease are now the leading causes of death worldwide. Yet the full scope of the links between diet and disease, soil and gut microbes, climate change and nutrient levels still remains shrouded in uncertainty.
Regulators are calling for more science to guide policy decisions, even as scientists discover new links between diet and health for conditions as diverse as macular degeneration and blood clotting disorders.
The 20th century witnessed the simplification of agriculture, resulting in a narrow focus on yield and efficiency of a handful of grain crops. The successes were significant, but at the expense of diversity, food quality and agricultural resilience. The superfoods – the trends, not the actual foods – are the collective poster child for this problem.
Now food systems are at a crossroads. The 21st century can become the century of diversity, as the new cornerstone of food science. But we need help to shed light on the dark matter in food and to map the complex interactions between food, ecosystems, climate and health.
While we call for a globally coordinated effort to fill the gaps in the food we eat, we must ensure that these efforts do not create scientific disparities between countries and regions.
We need capacity-building efforts so that all countries can participate equally and inclusively and benefit from knowledge about what is in our food, how it varies, and its implications for the health of people and the planet.
It is not enough to borrow superfoods from non-Westernized cultures and give them nothing in return. Today is the time to open the black box of food and create more nutritious food systems for all.
Selena Ahmed is a professor at the University of Montana and Global Director of Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) at the American Heart Association
Maya Rajasekharan is PTFI Director of Strategy Integration and Engagement at Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT
© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
