What if the food on your plate could be tailored to your body — taking into consideration your individual nutritional needs, how your body processes different foods and even what you like to eat?
That is the idea behind precision nutrition, an emerging field that brings together nutrition, agriculture, engineering, food science and technology to better understand how food affects individuals and how the food system can deliver healthier, safer and more sustainable food.
John Verboncoeur, a professor and senior associate dean of research in Michigan State University’s College of Engineering, serves on the executive committee and helped organize the National Science Foundation, or NSF, workshop for the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, or ERVA. The goal of ERVA is to examine the future of precision nutrition and the research needed to make it possible.
Jade Mitchell, a professor in the College of Engineering who also participated in the ERVA workshop, studies human risk analysis related to food safety.
Here, Verboncoeur and Mitchell explain precision nutrition, including what the future could look like, why the information on food labels doesn’t tell the whole story, and how engineering could help create a smarter, less wasteful food system.