Inside the Periodic Table of Food Initiative: Mapping food quality to improve human and planetary health

The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) aims to answer crucial nutrition questions: What exactly is in food, how does it change based on production, and how does it impact people’s health? With its global research partners, the PTFI is developing tools to standardize global research on environmental, agricultural, and cultural factors influencing food quality based on diverse components and implications for human and planetary health.

In this special series, Nutrition Insight dives into the global initiative with Selena Ahmed, PTFI’s global director based at the American Heart Association, and Mariana Barboza, research program manager for the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at the University of California (UC), Davis. 

UC Davis University was one of the first PTFI Centers of Excellence. These centers champion food quality research, capacity-strengthening efforts, and the translation of science to impact regional landscapes. 

“The PTFI is a multi-partner ecosystem, and two organizations manage it,” explains Ahmed. “One is the American Heart Association, and the other is the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) — bringing together leaders in health and agriculture to look at food systems in this integrative, holistic way.” 

She highlights that the PTFI has two main offerings — obtaining a comprehensive overview of what is in food and making sure that the data generated at different Centers of Excellence are comparable. 

“We standardize and develop a measuring stick for what is in food and how we look at it,” Ahmed says. “When UC Davis is looking at food, and our collaborators in Wageningen, Ethiopia, or Australia are looking at food, we’re looking at it in the same way, and we can bring that data together to get a high-resolution photograph of what is in food.” 

“That’s the foundation of nutrition and health, and that’s what the PTFI is — a global initiative mapping food quality and enabling a global ecosystem to map food quality using standardized multi-omics tools, data, and training.” 

Ahmed says that PTFI and its partners support global food quality mapping with standardized tools, data, and training.Multi-omics combines data from different biological molecules of one specific type, such as proteomics to study proteins and lipidomics to study fats (lipids). These tools allow for the characterization and quantification of molecule sets in foods. 

PTFI focuses on answering three main research questions. What is in food? How does food composition vary based on agricultural practices, specifically sustainable farming practices, such as regenerative agriculture or agroecology? What are the implications for human health and planetary health?

Speaking the same language

Ahmed explains that PTFI initially conducted a landscaping assessment to determine whether food data gathered at worldwide high-performing labs was comparable and concluded that it wasn’t. 

“If we’re building a road system and we ask people to measure the length of a distance, some use rulers with centimeters, some use inches, others use hands, and some use strings. This works independently, but we cannot combine it to have evidence at scale for data-driven solutions.”

Barboza adds: “We are developing this common language, chemically, so we can all understand the food and compare it in the same way.” 

She details that the PTFI and its partners are creating an “encyclopedia of foods,” one page at a time. 

“We are creating a phenomenal amount of data that will enable the development of new products where we understand the bioactivity, with new molecules that were never discovered before, to understand the health benefits of food.” 

Centers of Excellence

The PTFI has an ecosystem of partners worldwide, including Centers of Excellence and partner and national labs. The Centers of Excellence are applying the tools to answer place-based research questions, map food quality, and translate that into solutions. 

Barboza details ongoing research projects at UC Davis to map food composition, quality, and health impact. 

PTFI and its partners also aim to determine how agricultural practices, such as sustainable farming, impact food composition.“We’re studying how agriculture practices are impacting food quality and composition. Promptly, we need to provide solutions on how foods are produced and how that impacts farmers and food systems.” 

For example, conventional food might contain pesticides, whereas organic or regenerative practices may prevent that, which can be analyzed by determining a food’s composition. 

“But how does that impact the carbohydrates, lipids, or vitamins in food?” she adds. 

“We are providing solutions in that landscape, and we have a phenomenal program that we have been running for the last two years, where we are trying to understand how agricultural practices impact the food we eat.”

In addition, UC Davis performs clinical trials, with interventions examining how food impacts people’s blood profile. 

“We can now map how everyone is responding to food,” says Barboza. “That is important because everyone is different, and we metabolize food differently. It is crucial to understand this to help develop dietary guidelines and new medical practices that will help people with different needs. It is global, but at the same time, it’s personalized.”

In addition to UC Davis, PTFI’s Centers of Excellence include the Institute of Public Health (Mexico), Javeriana (Colombia), Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana), Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Mahidol University (Thailand), the University of Adelaide (Australia), and the University of the South Pacific (Fiji). 

National and partner labs include the US Department of Agriculture, the National Agriculture Research Organization (Japan), the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the National Institute of Nutrition (India), the National Agriculture Organization (South Korea), Imperial College London (UK), Denmark Technical University, the University of Alberta (Canada), and the University of Hawaii (US). 

Making high-resolution pictures

PTFI uses its standardized tools to determine what is in food. Ahmed says that although previous research has made many advances in food composition, the photograph is still “blurry.” 

Barboza says that UC Davis research projects map food composition, quality, and health impact.“If you’re taking a blurry photograph, where we understand total lipids, carbohydrates, and protein but don’t have a nuanced understanding, our picture of food is fuzzy. With that fuzzy understanding of food, we’re unable to use the knowledge of food to make these more precise recommendations for agriculture, diets, or health.” 

Ahmed says that the Centers of Excellence play a role in R&D and tool development and in applying these tools. “Some of the Centers of Excellence are experts in their field. At UC Davis, we have the global leaders in proteomics and metabolomics. These experts have also actively co-created standardized multi-omics tools that the PTFI has offered and is distributing.”  

Research projects at the Centers of Excellence focus on local needs and regional, national, and global challenges, covering three main buckets.

“Those are in the areas of biodiversity loss — unsustainable agricultural practices that degrade ecosystems and result in toxins in our food — malnutrition, including diet-related chronic diseases, and food insecurity.” 

PTFI also focuses on strengthening capacities with Food EDU, where Ahmed is the dean. This open-access educational platform facilitates the translation and application of research in food, agriculture, nutrition, and health. 

Ahmed says capacity development is key for the initiative and its partners — “training the next generation of scientists to generate this type of comprehensive food composition data and how to apply it.”