Nutritional Dark Matter
The Alpha Edison Perspective
In the great dark room of nutrition, we have been searching for answers by candlelight. Science is beginning to flip on light switches to reveal a nutritional space that is much larger and more ornate than we understood, and many had even imagined. Harnessing newly available data and AI capabilities, cutting-edge research is rapidly evolving our understanding of the nutritional content in food—beyond the one hundred and fifty nutrients measured by the USDA to the tens of thousands of biochemical compounds that define how food impacts human health. This nutritional dark matter offers new insights into global health solutions and large new markets.
Our senses, genetically tuned over the long arc of evolution, feed our intuition. Often, human intuition has the answer before the conscious mind recognizes it. Pioneers in the natural food movement spoke about the life force of food. One could smell it, taste it, see it, feel it, indeed sometimes hear it. We could sense that a tomato grown in healthy soil eaten shortly after harvest was a fundamentally different food—with a dramatically different nutritional profile and density—than one that was grown in dead dirt using chemical fertilizers and then processed and stored for weeks (or months). We just didn’t know how to measure that difference.
We are at the forefront of a revolution in nutritional science. The intersection of computational biology and chemistry is illuminating nutritional dark matter—the hidden components of food, digestion and metabolism that profoundly affect our physical and mental health. Although we have barely scratched the surface of this knowledge, we are beginning to estimate its vastness: scientists recently showed that the biochemical spectrum of our diets contains more than 130,000 micronutrients. Many of these components are turning out to be crucial for preventing and combating diseases via multiple causal pathways, from shaping how our bodies regulate gene activation and transcription to sustaining the crucial metabolic processes carried out by our gut microbiomes.
Our food labels list a mere 13 “essential nutrients,” which are only weakly correlated with health outcomes. The USDA references only 150 known nutrients. Yet, most food is made up of ingredients that were once alive, dependent on a large and diverse set of biochemicals for success and survival. These biochemicals interact with one another and our individual metabolic systems.
NEW INSIGHTS
Scientific discoveries at the intersection of nutrition and human health are yielding new insights, debunking many commonly held assumptions:
Millions of microbes in the gut make up a separate living organism that governs health, brain function, athletic performance, and mental wellbeing.
Starved of essential nutrients for decades, gut biodiversity is declining with each generation, coinciding with rapidly increasing rates of obesity and a plethora of diseases.
The industrial food chain has surprisingly large and unprecedented second- and third-order deleterious impacts on human society, including altering epigenetics.
Carbs and fats are not inherently bad—how they are grown and consumed matters.
Fiber is more of a hero ingredient than a neutral digestive aid.
Ultra-processed foods can be more addictive than scheduled drugs.
Organic is a proxy—helpful but not a shortcut to healthy nutrition.
Most advice is only partially relevant to your unique microbiology and genetics.
Advances in computational biology and machine learning applied to chemical analysis are accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, promising to alter what we eat and how we eat it, with dramatic implications for health outcomes across the world.
FOOD SYSTEM IN CRISIS
Industrial food production and distribution, alongside advances in medical science, has yielded remarkable benefits. Over the course of a century, human lifespans have doubled and starvation has been nearly eliminated in the developed world. A dazzling variety of food products have become readily available to a wide cross-section of the population, regardless of their growing season and geographic origin.
When measured by the declining cost per calorie, our modern food system has been a resounding success. Food has become vastly cheaper, accounting for 11 percent of disposable income in 2024 compared to 42 percent in 1901. This has freed up significant resources to be spent and invested in technological progress and economic growth.
But these advances have come with unanticipated costs, which we are only beginning to understand. Emptied of its most valuable nutritional components and chock-full of highly processed additives, the mass-produced, shelf-stable food we eat every day is making us sick—as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of colon cancer, auto-immune disorders, and obesity—and it is starving the gut flora that turns out to be essential for our wellbeing. Earlier gains in mortality and morbidity are reversing, all while the cost of food is increasing, nutritional yields are declining, and the food system is threatened by climate shocks. Nutrition must be transformed if humanity is to thrive.
Fortunately, science is helping to shed light on the causal chain between how food is grown and how it impacts human health. Much as medicine was revolutionized by antibiotics, vaccines, and advanced imaging, the fusion of molecular biology and genetics with high-powered computation, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology is illuminating and harnessing nutritional dark matter, promising to forever alter how we think about food. We are transitioning from an era when the reduced cost of a calorie was the ultimate indicator of progress to one where nutritional density and individualized health impact will be increasingly measurable and available at scale.
WHAT IS NUTRITIONAL DARK MATTER?
Nutritional dark matter refers to the vast volume of nutritional components and metabolic processes whose interactions govern human wellbeing, but which remain poorly understood by modern science. As with astrophysical dark matter, the scope of what we don’t know is coming into focus, offering a map for future discovery. Scientific and technological innovation has illuminated new regions of this space, with major implications for disease prevention and mitigation through the food system and dietary practices.
In astrophysics, dark matter describes materials we cannot see but whose presence is theoretically predictable. In the early 1900s, scientists compared the number of observable stars with the total gravity exerted by our galaxy and the numbers didn't add up. This implied that there must be more material in the universe keeping our galaxy intact than what was directly observable. We knew this “dark matter” existed, but we didn't have the technological means to understand it. The subsequent advent of particle accelerators and high-power telescopes allowed us to begin probing the nature of the dark matter that makes up 95 percent of the universe’s mass. Similarly, in nutrition, we have identified a vast volume of unknown matter that shapes how food affects our health. We are now beginning to apply spectrometers, computational techniques, and genomics to measure, analyze, and understand those essential nutritional components and processes.
The resulting illumination of nutritional dark matter represents a phase transition in our knowledge of the human body and its interaction with the environment. Nutrition had long seemed like a simple and uninteresting process: a dedicated digestive system—separate from other bodily functions—breaks down food into energy and eliminates what remains undigestible. A series of nutritional fads became the accepted wisdom: no fat, no sugar, no red meat, no dairy, swap in oat milk and plant protein (have you seen the additives?), drink pressed juice (actually, maybe juice is bad), eat organic, avoid seed oils. The endless advice has been exhausting and often contradictory. And it turns out that much of it is at best a gross oversimplification. We now know that:
Digestion is not discrete. It is intertwined with all other physiological systems, so that what we eat affects not only our weight, but also our mental health, cognitive functions, and resistance to diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s.
The digestive system is not a passive energy pipeline. At its core is a bustling microbiome—a mass of living organisms that weighs more than the average human brain and whose health shapes all aspects of human wellbeing. Century-long nutritional practices have starved our microbiomes, with deleterious consequences for our health.
Macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, etc.) are not where the action is. Each nutrient is deeply differentiated, none are inherently good or bad, and their nutritional benefits lie in their complex—and still not fully understood—interactions with one another and with our unique individual physiology. But beyond these standard components of our diets, we are just beginning to understand the crucial role played by tens of thousands of other biochemicals present in our food.
In short, science is turning a century of nutritional knowledge on its head. If currently emerging trends persist, our future will be one in which food serves as not only sustenance and pleasure but also medicine, preventing and treating diseases and boosting cognitive and mental health based on highly individualized nutritional knowledge. At the same time, food production will become increasingly sustainable, yielding much higher nutritional density at lower economic and environmental costs.
SCIENCE IS UNLOCKING NEW UNDERSTANDINGS OF NUTRITION
We have already made considerable strides in understanding the effects of nutritional dark matter on human wellbeing—and this is merely the beginning.
We now know a lot more about how nutrition and ingredients interact with our bodies and impact health. For instance, over the last 10 years, research has challenged decades of accepted beliefs about the impact of dietary fats and cholesterol on cardiac health [1, 2, 3]. In fact, it is sugar intake that primarily contributes to triglycerides and higher LDLs [4].
We are gaining a better understanding of how nutrition impacts our microbiome, which then affects our bodies. Nutrition is not only a matter of how humans feed their own bodies but also how they feed the microbiomes within their digestive systems. Poor microbiome health has been linked to a variety of inflammatory diseases, including diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis [5]. We are also learning more about diverse metabolites that have pro- and anti-inflammatory properties, such as short-chain fatty acids.
We know much more about how the body interacts with itself, and about the holistic impact of the digestive system on a wide range of seemingly distant biological functions. For example, doctors had long believed that depression and anxiety caused irritable bowel syndrome symptoms, but recently the reverse has been shown: it is now believed that IBS directly causes depression and poor mental health via the enteric system, i.e., the neurons that govern the digestive system. These neurons continually send signals to the central nervous system that trigger mood changes [6]. Because this relationship is recursive, doctors now prescribe antidepressants to directly treat nerve cells in the gut.
SILENT SUFFERING AND LATENT DEMAND
People are increasingly aware that the food they are eating is contributing to their poor health. They want to eat better, but see few realistic alternatives to their current practices. They often lack the necessary information to improve their diets and for many, healthier food is too difficult to find. Nevertheless, they are willing to put in the effort and spend the money to eat better when given the opportunity.
Case in point: there are early indicators of latent demand for transformative nutritional products. Annual growth in the organic food market, an increasingly mainstream product category, is outpacing that of conventional foods by more than 100% and the difference is largely driven by consumers’ concerns over health and wellbeing. An entirely new market for GLP-1 and other hormonal analogues, which help alleviate diabetes and obesity, but also cardiovascular disease and a range of mental health conditions, has exploded in the past two years, reaching $47B in 2024, with a projected cumulative annual growth of 33 percent over the next ten years. Gut health products—such as prebiotics and probiotics—are gaining rapid traction, representing a $15B market in 2024 with an estimated CAGR of 8.3 percent.
The latent demand for healthy nutrition, as signaled by these trends, is likely to be unlocked by a cascade of forthcoming breakthroughs in nutritional dark matter. Meanwhile, consumers will become increasingly aware of the growing range of health problems that can be prevented and treated through better eating. From curbing obesity (a condition affecting 43 percent of the population) to treating autoimmune disorders like Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis (the lived experience for one in six Americans), the use of food as medicine is quickly becoming a reality. The ability to tackle other ailments, like migraines and depression, is also within reach.
Consumers are experiencing significant silent suffering around their health and are ready for a sea change. Behind this sits a large pool of latent demand.
THE TAKEAWAY
The illumination of nutritional dark matter will transform everyday consumer behavior, human health and wellbeing, and the $1.5B food industry as a whole, creating lucrative investment opportunities. Why now? Because science in this domain is advancing at an exponential rate and technology is poised to supercharge the resulting innovations.
Imagine discovering that the periodic table of elements was 1,000 times larger than assumed—this is the likely scope of discovery in nutritional science in the coming years. By leveraging AI to explore the thousands of biochemical compounds in food ingredients and their complex interactions with individual microbiomes and metabolic processes, scientists and entrepreneurs will have the capacity to maximize nutritional value while generating vastly better health outcomes for billions of people.
The new addressable market for nutritional innovation is significant: we all eat and most of us want to feel healthier for longer, but few of us know how to use the former to achieve the latter. As the discovery of nutritional dark matter remakes the food chain from soil and barn to supermarket and the dinner table, humanity will benefit—and entrepreneurs along with their investor partners will reap generous rewards.
RED CELL. The future can be uncooperative. Conditions change. Unintended consequences appear. For a dissenting view, consider the following scenarios:
Successful commercialization is difficult and takes longer than anticipated
Gains are marginal, and not material
Consumers become fatigued with endless health and wellness information
Worse consumer behavior is driven more by the prevailing narrative than logic
New developments provide opportunities for health-washing and fraud
Unanticipated health side effects slow adoption and progress
AE, as always, is applying our Insights practice to see and understand emerging opportunities before they become obvious. Advances in nutritional dark matter (NDM) are still in the early stages. The pace of scientific discovery is accelerating yet unknown unknowns loom large. In the months ahead, we will share our insights into specific topics related to NDM, including: early signals of latent demand for food-based medicine as revealed by the market for GLP-1, a taxonomy of innovations directed at new market opportunities in NDM, leading scientific research illuminating the vast range of unknown nutritional compounds that constitute NDM, and the impact of NDM on epigenetics, gut health and the human brain.
If your work touches on nutritional dark matter—or you are interested in further exploring this topic—please get in touch. We would be thrilled.