How to unlock the future of nutrition through the power of food

We are facing a global health crisis fuelled not just by what we eat, but by how little we truly understand the food we rely on.

More than half of the world’s population struggles to access healthy diets. And millions of lives are cut short every year by diet-related chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and cardiovascular disease – the leading cause of death worldwide.

The impact goes far beyond families and communities and comes with a staggering financial toll too. In the United States alone, total cardiovascular disease-related costs are expected to triple to $1.8 trillion by 2050.

To reverse this dire trajectory, we must understand food with the same precision we apply to medicine. Imagine if we could know the nutritional value of every bite, trace the journey of our food from farm to table, and use that knowledge to keep ourselves and our loved ones healthier.

By making food quality and nutrition central to our health strategy, we can shift from treating disease to building lasting health.

That’s where the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) comes in. It aims to map food quality and inspire groundbreaking discoveries that help us better understand how food impacts health.

Most of us think of food as fuel, but every bite contains thousands of molecules – each with the potential to affect our health in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

The PTFI uses cutting-edge science to decode what’s in our food. With a global network of more than 25 collaborating institutions, including nine centres of excellence spanning every continent, researchers use the initiative’s tools to analyse and share standardized and comprehensive food composition data.

Just as we know the active ingredients in medicine, we can now pinpoint the active compounds in foods. These can change depending on where and how food is grown. Healthier soil means healthier food. For example, not all tomatoes are created equally. One may be packed with nutrients while another, grown in different soil, may not be.

These hidden differences can impact blood pressure, inflammation and heart health. The PTFI helps researchers identify these differences, enabling us to improve food quality while restoring ecosystems.

By measuring food at the molecular level, we can move from providing broad advice to targeted, life-saving recommendations. Connecting this science to how food is grown strengthens the link between healthy people and a healthy planet.

A prevention-first mindset is critical to reducing the burden of cardiovascular disease. Food is not only a foundational element of health, but also a catalyst for economic opportunity.

Countries such as the Netherlands, Colombia, Thailand, Ethiopia and the United Kingdom are strengthening their nutrition strategies by prioritizing nutrient-rich foods, promoting biodiversity, supporting sustainable sourcing and investing in community-driven food programmes.

The American Heart Association’s work serves as a model for how food quality measurement can strengthen these efforts worldwide. By integrating the PTFI’s biomolecular data into real-world interventions, we’re generating insights that can be adapted to diverse cultural, agricultural and public health contexts globally.

As Rajiv Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, notes: “The Periodic Table of Food Initiative’s groundbreaking work is deepening our understanding of food and unveiling new possibilities for unlocking lifelong health.”

These efforts are laying the foundation for a scalable, data-driven transformation in nutrition-based health strategies. This shift is already taking shape across three key areas:

Whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains are the foundation of healthy diets and sustainable food systems. Yet not all are created equal. With the PTFI’s multi-omics tools, we can now see how growing conditions shape the nutrient density of our food. These insights help us promote practices that deliver the greatest benefits for both human and planetary health – ensuring the items on our plates are beneficial for lowering blood pressure, improving metabolic health and supporting ideal heart health.

New approaches demonstrate how precision nutrition and artificial intelligence (AI) can work together to guide everyday choices towards better health and sustainability. The American Heart Association is working with collaborators to develop AI-powered decision platforms built on the PTFI’s molecular food data.

One example is Swap It Smart, a tool developed with support from the Bezos Earth Fund. This platform evaluates foods for nutrition, environmental impact, health benefits and affordability. It then recommends evidence-based ingredient swaps tailored to what matters most to the user, whether that’s health, sustainability, or cost. This tool will equip experts with practical guidance to optimize school meals, menus and product formulations for people and the planet.

Historically, dietary research has focused on what people eat without analysing the molecular content of their food. That limits our understanding of food’s true impact on health. With the PTFI’s tools, we’re now able to build a strong evidence base that links food composition directly to health outcomes – strengthening the science behind future dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.

By harnessing food-quality data and integrating it with nutrition and public health, we can shift from treatment to prevention, improve global health and build resilient, sustainable food systems.

True health begins before clinical care – with the choices we make about food and the systems that support it. For the first time, we can measure food with the precision of medicine and use that knowledge to build a healthier, more sustainable future for all.

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is a project of RF Catalytic Capital, a public charity affiliated with The Rockefeller Foundation. It’s co-managed by the American Heart Association and Alliance of Bioversity CIAT.