The 'Dark Matter' of Nutrition Affects You
Did you know that the USDA identified 67 nutritional components in raw Garlic?
Garlic in fact has 2,306 distinct chemical components! We have discussed in length the enzyme allicin, the chemical that creates that amazing aroma we love to smell when we crush garlic for salad dressing. We know of luteolin, the flavone with its cardiovascular protective qualities.
But these two amazing components are not tracked by the USDA but only in the FooDB database (Barabási et al., 2020). This is important as it affects all of us.
The gap between the plant components that formally stamped by the USDA and what is known in wider data banks is described by Barabási and his team as the 'dark matter' of nutrition, since they are not being researched for medicinal use and are not known to the public.
Read this article to learn more about the awesome qualities of garlic for your health.
Abstract
Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease. Article
Garlic: Broad Antimicrobial Support
Garlic: Broad Antimicrobial Support
References
- Barabási, A. L., Menichetti, G., & Loscalzo, J. (2020). The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet. Nature Food, 1(1), 33-37. Article
- Available at: http://foodb.ca/compounds. (Accessed: 1st August 2019).
- Garlic, Raw (USDA). Available at: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169230/nutrients.
To your health,
Dohrea
We have developed our products based on scientific research and/or the practical experience of many healthcare practitioners. There is a growing body of literature on food based nutrition and supplements and their application in support of our health. Please use our products under the advisement of your doctor.
Green Facts:
And more on the dark matter of nutrition: Jacobs, D. M., Van Den Berg, M. A., & Hall, R. D. (2021). Towards superior plant-based foods using metabolomics. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 70, 23-28. Article |
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