Nutrition is the science that interprets how the food we eat affects our health and well-being. I believe the field is ripe to be turned into a mathematical field where equations would guide our understanding of the human body, somewhat similarly to how we study physics.

Nutrition is probably the only science about which people take things very personally. Think politics meeting religion. Many of us have very strong opinions about what healthy nutrition is all about. Since I co-founded Nutrino, the most common question I get “is this food healthy?”

But this is a tricky question. The answer should depend on the person, the amount, and the context. But even if it doesn’t, it is not that simple.

One of the hardest things about nutrition is how hard it is to establish cause and effect relationships between the food we eat and our well-being. We often use our weight as a proxy for well-being, however, weight is far from being an ideal way of measuring well-being. Even if it was, considering you can only see changes in weight over a time frame of multiple days, and during those days you eat dozens of different foods, how could you isolate which foods made you gain weight? Was it the rice or the banana? Or was it the chocolate?

This is one reason why I like Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs). Glucose is a useful biomarker for measuring how foods affect your body because it is directly related to metabolism. Using a CGM you can see the effect that food has on your body within minutes to a couple of hours. This makes the cause and effect relationships much easier to comprehend. This is not to say that glucose is the only useful biomarker to track the effects of foods on our bodies, but for now it is the best one we have.

In an ideal world, we could measure many postprandial (post meal) biomarkers along with glucose. Once many biomarkers are measured, we can start asking and answering very quantitative questions. How much of this food is good for me? If I include certain foods in my diet, how much would it affect my weight over the long run? Would it affect my risk of developing any diseases?

Many would say that the body is complex and way too messy of a thing to try and describe mathematically. But I’d argue that this complexity is solvable with enough data, and is definitely governed by natural laws.

Nutrition should be grounded on mathematics.

Just like the intersection of physics and math brought to being “mathematical physics”, the world of “mathematical nutrition” is still awaiting us.