When I eat a Margherita pizza, I think I know exactly what I'm about to ingest: carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, a little fat. But the reality is shocking. That simple pizza contains over 1.200 different chemical compounds, only a handful of which have ever been studied by science. This is the nutritional dark matter, a universe of invisible molecules that we eat every day without knowing what they do to our bodies.
Scientists estimate that only 5% of food chemistry is knownThe rest is uncharted territory that affects our health and disease. We literally have no idea what we eat: how is this possible? And what does it mean?
The universe hidden on our plate
For decades, we've thought about food as if it were simple: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins. About 150 known chemical compounds that nutritional science has catalogued and studied. But researchers at theManchester University they discovered something amazing. Giulia Menichetti, the Ravenna-based physicist who maps the “dark matter” of food revealed how we started with 26 thousand members and now we are at 160 thousand.
In practice, cooking and industrial food processing alter natural ingredients and introduce elements that our original diet did not include. As the researcher explains:
There is a “dark matter” in food and it consists of all the chemical components present that have never been analyzed in epidemiology.
When food becomes pure chemistry
The comparison with astronomy is not accidental. As the universe is dominated by dark matter which makes up 27% of the cosmos, even food hides an invisible but decisive reality. Example: the TMAO extension (trimethylamine N-oxide), produced when intestinal bacteria metabolize compounds in red meat and eggs, increases the risk of heart disease. Garlic, on the other hand, contains substances that block its production.
That's not all. Intestinal bacteria transform ellagic acid (present in fruits and nuts) in urolithins, compounds that keep mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of our cells, healthy. And the Mediterranean diet It works not only for known nutrients, but precisely for this invisible network of chemical interactions. Have I piqued your interest? Want to know more?
So let's talk about foodomics
La foodomics integrates genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and proteomics To analyze the biochemical, molecular, and cellular composition of foods. It no longer considers food merely as a source of energy, but as a means to promote health and reduce the risk of disease.
Food biomarkers (molecules that reveal how our bodies process what we eat) provide more precise information than traditional dietary assessments. Foodomics studies how different people react to foods based on their genetic characteristics, allowing for the development of personalized diets.
Algorithms that decode the dish
Artificial intelligence has developed an algorithm called Food Processing Score (FPro), capable of processing a huge variety of data from nutritional labels on packages to classify foods on a scale from 0 (all-natural) to 1 (ultra-processed).
Projects like the Foodome Project is cataloging over 130.000 molecules, linking dietary compounds to human proteins, gut bacteria, and disease processes. The goal is to build an atlas of how diet interacts with the body, identifying which molecules truly matter for health.
Nutritional dark matter can even modify genes through epigenetics, Changes in gene activity that do not alter the DNA itself. Children born to mothers who suffered famine in the Netherlands during World War II were more likely to develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and schizophrenia. Decades later, scientists discovered that their gene activity had been altered by what their mothers had (or had not) eaten during pregnancy.
The substances we don't see but that transform us
Compounds such as the lignans (present in flax seeds, sesame, whole grains) act as phytoestrogens, modulating hormonal activity. stilbenes Plants such as resveratrol in grapes exhibit antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-tumor properties. Many of these substances represent plant defense mechanisms that, when ingested, influence our biology in ways that are still largely unknown.
THEEuropean Food Safety Authority acknowledges that “all foods are made up of chemicals” and that many are “mostly harmless and often desirable,” but emphasizes that the chemical complexity of food is still largely unexplored.
The future lies in molecular mapping
The discovery of nutritional dark matter will transform the way we think about nutrition. It's no longer about "what to eat" but about "which of the thousands of unknown molecules can influence our health."
As for cosmic dark matter, which dictates the movement of galaxies while remaining invisible, These food compounds may determine health and disease far more than traditional calories and vitamins.
The next time you eat pizza (or anything else), remember: we're exploring a chemical universe that science has only just begun to map. And what we discover will change everything we thought we knew about nutrition.
