STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • An estimated 99% of the components making up whole food are a complete mystery. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference details 188 nutritional components of food, including 38 flavonoids, yet scientists estimate there are more than 26,000 different biochemicals in our food
  • We know even less about the constituents of processed foods and synthetic foods, which falsely claim to be “equivalents” to whole foods, such as “animal-free meats” or “animal-free milk”
  • Scientists cannot create equivalence when they don’t even know what 85% or more of the whole food they’re trying to replicate consists of
  • A paper published in the April 2023 issue of Animal Frontiers warns that cultured products are not nutritionally equivalent to the meats they’re intended to replace
  • A May 2023 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization concluded there are at least 53 potential health hazards associated with lab-grown meat, including the possibility of contamination with heavy metals, microplastics, nanoplastics and chemicals, allergenic additives, toxic components, antibiotics and prions

Do you know what’s in the food you eat? Remarkable as it may seem, 99% of the components making up whole food are a complete mystery. As reported by New Scientist in July 2020:1

“We know next to nothing about the vast majority of compounds in our diet … ‘Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components,’2 says Albert-László Barabási at Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark matter.

‘But these represent only a small fraction of the biochemicals present in our food’ … The idea that food is a rich and complex mix of biochemicals is hardly news.

Even the well-known macronutrients — proteins, carbohydrates and fats — are hugely diverse. There’s also a vast supporting cast of micronutrients: minerals, vitamins and other biochemicals, many of which are only present in minuscule quantities, but which can still have profound health effects.”

The official source of nutritional information is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.3 It lists the composition of hundreds of thousands of foods, but it’s not as detailed as you might imagine.

In all, it details only 188 nutritional components, including 38 flavonoids, yet scientists estimate there are more than 26,000 different biochemicals in our food.4,5

As noted by New Scientist,6 “with the USDA as your guide, 99.5% of the components in food are a mystery,” and as noted by Barabási, “It would be foolish to dismiss 99.5% of the compounds we eat as unimportant7 … We will not really understand how we get sick if we don’t solve this puzzle.”8

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