Our Journey

Over the past decade, researchers at the BarabásiLab (Northeastern University) have worked to fundamentally rethink how we understand food and its relationship to human health.

This work led to the Foodome Project: an ambitious effort to map the full chemical complexity of the human diet and understand how food molecules, processing, and dietary patterns shape disease risk and longevity. Today, we are bringing this science to Europe.

Across Europe and globally, chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders account for the majority of healthcare burden. A growing body of evidence shows that these conditions are driven less by genetics and more by environmental factors — with diet playing a central role.

Yet modern nutrition science still relies heavily on outdated frameworks. Most food databases track roughly 100–150 nutrients, while recent research has revealed that foods contain more than 135,000 distinct chemical compounds. The vast majority of these molecules are not systematically measured, regulated, or understood.

This uncharted biochemical landscape — often referred to as the “dark matter of nutrition” — is especially prominent in ultra-processed foods, which now dominate food supplies in both the United States and Europe.

The Foodome is a scientific response to this gap. By combining machine learning, AI-driven literature mining, and experimental data, the Foodome builds a molecular atlas of food that goes far beyond traditional nutrition tables.

This approach enables:

• Systematic identification of previously untracked food compounds
• Linking food molecules to biological pathways and disease mechanisms
• Studying how industrial processing alters food chemistry
• Predicting interactions between foods, drugs, and health outcomes

At its core, the Foodome applies network medicine to nutrition — connecting foods, molecules, diseases, and human biology into a single, interpretable knowledge framework.

FoodProX translates these scientific insights into tools that can be used in real-world settings, starting with food processing transparency.