We all hear the same advice: eat more vegetables, cut back on sugar, buy nutrient-dense and local when possible. But how do we actually know what’s in the food we eat?
A new global review published in Frontiers in Nutrition looked at 101 food composition databases (FCDBs) from 110 countries and found most are out of date, incomplete or hard to use. In many low- and middle-income regions, the gaps are especially wide, if a database exists at all.
These databases are meant to help shape everything from school lunches to crop breeding strategies to national nutrition policies. But the study found that only 30% of databases were fully accessible, fewer than half met standards for reuse and some hadn’t been updated in over 50 years. The majority report only basic nutrients like calories or protein, overlooking thousands of food compounds modern science can now detect.
Traditional and Indigenous foods are often missing entirely. When they’re left out, so is the full picture of global nutrition and the incentive to keep those foods in cultivation, which poses a risk to agricultural biodiversity.
The review was led by researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. They emphasized that without reliable food composition data, it becomes harder to identify nutrient gaps in populations, develop effective food policies or ensure diverse diets are supported in science and policy.
The paper also highlights a solution: the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI). This global effort, co-led by the American Heart Association and the Alliance, uses cutting-edge tools to analyze over 30,000 biomolecules per food and includes foods from every continent, especially those underrepresented in traditional databases. PTFI’s data is open-access and built to modern FAIR data standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
This research was supported by the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and reflects a growing call for global cooperation, better tools and equity in how we document and share food knowledge.