Having established the case for the necessity to collect more and more comprehensive, high quality, and accurate data, how exactly did we go about doing that, and making the results that we found meaningful and useful in a practical way?

Phase one, started in the first year of research and completed in August 2021, consisted in the collection, organization and structuring of enormous quantities of data related to food composition, with the aim to create a state-of-the-art detailed database with chemicals, nutrients, food-raw materials, daily intake, and health indicators across Europe. In order to be able to understand, interpret, and use such huge amount of data it has been necessary to develop systems-based methodologies (mostly artificial intelligence methods) that fully enable cross-disciplinary integrative approaches. In practice, this meant going way beyond the techniques employed today, and getting down and find the true relationships at the chemical level in our foodstuffs, crucial to understand how, in turn, they affect our bodies.

The second phase, completed in June 2022, explored the correlation between the aggregated behavioral patterns of the reference-population, and the prevalence of certain non-communicable diseases. It was evident that in order to truly asses the risk factors between nutrition and health it is indispensable to refer to top-quality quantitative data rather than work with qualitative variables.

The final phase was a proof-of-concept study aimed to implement and test a theoretical and computational framework designed to find optimal solutions, compliant concurrently with a number of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.