As a young boy, John de la Parra’s idea of playtime entailed exploring the plants and crops of his family’s small farm in Boaz, Alabama. His greatest influence was his grandmother, who introduced him to the medicinal and therapeutic properties of plants. Over time, this passion blossomed into a love for science, and he began to make connections between ancient wisdom and modern scientific discoveries.
Today, de la Parra is living his childhood dream as an ethnobotanist and plant chemist, as well as the Director of the Food Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. He is part of a revolutionary team changing how we understand food.
The truth is, we know very little about what we eat.
“For centuries, traditional societies have revered certain foods for their medicinal and therapeutic properties,” he says. “But the scientific community has only just scratched the surface of understanding the biochemical composition and properties of what we consume.”
The idea that food is medicine has been central to human cultures for millennia, rooted in rich histories and intricate belief systems. Traditional societies meticulously passed down knowledge about specific foods’ medicinal properties through generations. As we move into an era of evidence-based practice, we find ourselves at a fascinating crossroads: investigating age-old traditions to uncover scientific truths while honoring the cultural contexts that birthed them.
To be honest— if you look at the numbers— it seems as if science has been falling behind.
Consider this. Our food contains many tiny parts called biomolecules, like proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, which help our bodies work. However, we routinely catalog only a tiny fraction of these—about 150 out of some tens of thousands, or less than 1% to be exact.
“A substantial portion of what humanity consumes remains a scientific mystery,” confirms Selena Ahmed, Global Director of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) at the American Heart Association. “Not only have these foods been invisible to nutritional science, but an estimated 95% of the biomolecules in food have escaped our analysis and don’t appear on food labels. We may think we know what we’re eating, but most of the time, we have limited understanding.”
But that’s about to change.
The groundbreaking PTFI— developed by The Rockefeller Foundation—includes a research database that captures the known and previously unknown biochemical properties or “dark matter” of food. PTFI biochemical data is gathered by using cutting-edge technologies like high-resolution mass spectrometry and artificial intelligence— providing a lens through which the secrets of ancient dietary wisdom can finally be scientifically validated.
PTFI’s standardized analytical methods and tools identify thousands of components in food, in labs … [+]
“For decades, food has been viewed through a reductionist lens, often simplified to calories and essential nutrients. PTFI promises to fundamentally change this approach for the better,” says Maya Rajasekharan, Managing Director of Africa at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and Director of Strategy Integration and Engagement of PTFI.
Supported by the American Heart Association and facilitated by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, PTFI has curated an initial list of 1,650 foods from around the globe, many cherished for their medicinal properties by indigenous cultures for millennia. The scientific community has already begun capturing data on about 500 of them.
PTFI data is being made available to the public via MarkerLab, an online data visualization tool. Chi-Ming Chien, developer and Co-Founder of Verso Biosciences, says the interface will help users visualize and explore the data in a clear and informative way, allowing researchers “to compare foods and compounds of interest across the entire PTFI database to spark the next scientific discoveries around food, nutrition, agriculture and health.”
But like ancient wisdom, the data must also tell a story.
“There’s a desire as humans to understand the natural world around us,” says de la Parra. “We’re collecting all this empirical chemical data on foods, but we’re also collecting metadata— the additional information that describes those foods, such as, how was the food grown? Where was it grown? Why is it meaningful? How is this food used by a particular culture? These ideas of traditional ecological knowledge and traditional knowledge are particularly fascinating. The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is, in many ways, the world’s most comprehensive resource of edible biodiversity.”
John de la Parra at work
Understanding food composition— encompassing diverse biomolecules and their quantities across varying conditions— holds the key to empowering stakeholders across the food system. This knowledge allows for informed decisions that improve both planetary and human health, while helping to bridge the gap between traditional wisdom and modern science.
This initiative is timely as the world grapples with diet-related diseases and climate change. The narrow focus on a few staple crops—wheat, maize, and rice—has led to a loss of dietary diversity and resilience. PTFI’s diverse food list, which includes a wide array of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, animals, and even fungi and lichens, is essential for building a more sustainable and resilient food system.
“As the number of foods in the database grows, so will our collective understanding of the role of food in human and planetary health,” says Tracy Shafizadeh, a developer and director at Verso Biosciences.
Remarkably, more than 1,000 of the foods included in the PTFI repository are not in any globally recognized food composition databases, highlighting a significant gap in nutritional knowledge.
One example highlighted by the PTFI team is wattleseeds in the Acacia genus, a traditional food of Aboriginal Australians. Despite its long history of use, many of the 120 species in this genus are absent from global food databases. PTFI is shining a spotlight on such overlooked foods, raising important questions about their nutritional and medicinal qualities and their roles in ecosystems.
Wattleseed, a traditional food of Aboriginal Australians
PTFI’s efforts also resonate with broader environmental goals. As Bruce German, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of PTFI and Director of the Foods for Health Institute at the University of California, Davis says, “Agriculture is a major contributor to climate change and the devastation of the planet… The only way to fix this, the necessary step, is knowing what food is.”
To ensure cultural, geographic, and climatic inclusivity, PTFI has established nine Centers of Excellence on every major continent, seven of which are in low- and middle-income countries, to lead food biomolecular analysis and its regional translation. These centers include the University of Adelaide in Australia, the University of California, Davis, the Ethiopia Public Health Institute, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, the National Institute of Nutrition and Medical Sciences Salvador Zubirán in Mexico, Mahidol University in Thailand, the University of the South Pacific, and Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands.
“In addition to helping with the collection of food samples from around the world, having local institutions leading this effort ensures that people in those regions can ask culturally relevant questions about their food,” de la Parra explains. “For culturally sensitive foods, we’re being very mindful of how we collect and share data… to make sure that communities analyzing foods that are spiritually or culturally important to them don’t have to make all information publicly accessible.”
The nine centers of excellence are also making it possible for comparisons to be made across a variety of contexts.
“With PTFI, our methods are standardized,” says de la Parra. “So, if I analyze an apple in the US and someone in another country analyzes a different apple, we can compare apples to apples, literally.”
The implications of this work are profound. PTFI can validate traditional practices and pave the way for new, evidence-based dietary guidelines. This could lead to more natural, accessible, and effective health solutions, aligning perfectly with the growing interest in holistic well-being.
“There’s also an opportunity for advances in personalized nutrition,” adds de la Parra. “Each of us has a genetic heritage that evolved in a specific place, eating specific foods. Knowing the chemistry of those foods may allow us to make more precise health recommendations.”
Understanding the intricate biochemistry of foods can help create a sustainable food system utilizing a holistic approach that promotes diversity, sustainability, and resilience in food production and consumption.
The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is more than a scientific endeavor; it is a bridge between the past and the future, a melding of age-old wisdom with cutting-edge technology. As we continue to explore and validate the medicinal properties of traditional foods, we open new possibilities for health, sustainability, and global well-being. This is the dawn of a new era in understanding food as medicine—one that honors the past while embracing the future.
Chief Marcelino Apurina, of the Aldeia Novo Paraiso in the Western Amazon region of Brazil, near … [+]