Notes from the food-health nexus: how can we get consumer pull for nutrient density?

Lately, I’ve found myself in more and more conversations about the “food-health nexus”: the notion that what we eat is directly impacting our health.

It’s not just that kale, green smoothies, or eating the rainbow are “good for us.” There’s growing data and research pointing to the intricate relationship between growing practices and nutrient density and, ultimately, how good different foods actually are for our bodies.

The mainstream — including media, policymakers, and other commentators — is paying increasing attention to the link between what we eat and our health, thanks to the emergence of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic along with alarming data such as the £100 billion and $1 trillion annual costs of diet-related illness on the UK and US economies, respectively.

Just recently, the UK government announced a planned shift of its National Health Service towards prevention instead of treating sickness at the same time as increasing the sugar tax on soft drinks. There are also plans to ban junk food advertising targeting children from next year. And if you’re across the pond, you will no doubt have heard the tagline ‘Make America Healthy Again’ from the Trump campaign, with his backer Robert F. Kennedy Jr making several speeches about the link between food and health, calling more specifically for restrictions around ultra-processed foods and pesticides.

Politics aside, there’s clearly a shift in how we understand food, not just as sustenance, but as something we can intentionally engineer for better health outcomes. And that’s exciting.

Who’s measuring nutrient density?

A few organizations are doing deep research to link nutrient density with how food is produced, such as the non-profit Bionutrient Food Association and food testing and software startup Edacious, which is diving into the variability of nutrients in seemingly identical foods.

Edacious has started with milk. Two cartons of milk may look the same on the shelf, but one could be packing a much richer profile of vitamins and minerals than the other, just because of how the cows were raised or what they ate. More specifically, Edacious is looking at the levels of riboflavin (B2) in organic versus grass-fed versus conventional and more.

It’s easy to imagine how this might lead to a new “nutritional hierarchy” in the grocery store, but it’s also a bit overwhelming.

I’ve been hearing a lot about the “periodic table of food,” a concept funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. This idea is to create a standardized framework that breaks down foods at a molecular level, showing their nutritional differences in a way that’s clear and actionable. It’s like an ingredient label on steroids, telling us not only what’s inside but how that nutrient profile might differ from the next brand over. Imagine consumers making decisions based on molecular nutrition profiles rather than just calorie counts or “organic” tags. The tech to make this possible, through platforms that analyze food composition with mass spectroscopy such as Edacious as well as The Bionutrient Association, is coming closer to reality than I would’ve guessed.

But here’s the catch: how ready are consumers (or even retailers) to dig into this level of information? We’re used to quick choices—low-fat, non-GMO, organic, cage-free. Will people be willing to go deeper into the nutritional nitty-gritty, especially when that knowledge could come with a higher price tag? And what about the broader problem of “food label fatigue”?

Consumer pull-through?

On a recent panel here in London, where I was waxing lyrical about the consumer pull I expect from consumers who know one carrot is nutritionally superior to another, the wonderful Belinda Clarke of Agri-TechE told me about a broccoli variety — the beneforte — that hit supermarket shelves in the UK several years ago touting cancer-beating properties and promptly flopped. I’ve certainly never seen it on supermarket selves. My sense is that was a marketing issue more than anything else, however.

As with everything, there is potential for unintended consequences, such as how smaller producers might fare if they need to access the latest tech to conduct in-depth analyses on their produce. On the flip side, a focus on nutrient-dense farming could reshape demand across the entire supply chain: we could see pricing models shift toward nutritional value, which might be a win for the little guy—if the market adapts.

And of course, there’s the issue of food access more generally, given that 828 million people go to bed hungry each year and many millions more are malnourished or nutrient deficient from a lack of access to healthy foods. We need people to eat more vegetables full stop, regardless of their nutritional profile. But food scarcity notwithstanding, better food education can help and that’s where more reliable and accessible data and research could play a role.

Nonprofits, startups, and even a few big players are starting to take on the challenge of educating people and pushing for transparency. But imagine if policymakers incentivized nutrient-dense crops or made them more affordable? What if consumers started demanding nutrient analysis with their labels? We might see this transformation pick up speed, but we’re definitely not there yet.

These conversations have me thinking a lot about how tech, health, and agriculture intersect, and how much more complicated things might get before they get simpler. But that’s where the opportunity lies: in figuring out how to communicate these ideas, both to consumers and to the broader food industry, in a way that’s both digestible and actionable.

I’ll keep following this food-health thread, listening to people who are much deeper in the trenches than I am, and sharing what I find along the way. If nothing else, it’s fascinating to watch as the food-health nexus inch from concept to reality, one nutrient-dense carrot (or glass of milk) at a time.

If you are working in the food-health nexus, please get in touch! [email protected]

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