In this week’s Study Spotlight, and over the next three columns, I’ll be sharing the background behind my latest book, Dinner with God: Understanding The Language of Food, and why nutrition science must move beyond focusing on nutrients alone.
From Tokens to Grammar: Behind The Language of Food
Segment 1: From Nutrients to Information: Rethinking Food
For more than a century, nutrition science has treated food as a set of numbers.
Calories.
Grams of fats, carbs, and protein.
Milligrams and percent RDAs of vitamins and minerals.
This framework helped solve some of the twentieth century’s greatest medical mysteries. But it may not be sufficient to explain the diseases that dominate the twenty-first century. Over the next several columns, I’ll share some of the scientific ideas behind my latest book, Dinner with God: Understanding the Language of Food, and why nutrition science may need to move beyond nutrients alone.
The Nutrient Revolution — and Its Limits
For most of the last century, nutrition science treated food as a series of measurements followed by targets.
Calories (“less is more”).
Carbohydrates (“eat more… no eat less… wait, it depends”).
Fat (“avoid”).
Protein (“eat more”).
Vitamins and minerals (“just take a pill”).
These measurements were not mistakes. In fact, they were among the great scientific triumphs of modern medicine. By identifying essential nutrients, scientists eliminated diseases like scurvy, pellagra, and rickets that once devastated populations. But those tools were designed to solve a very specific problem: nutrient deficiency.
Today’s dominant diseases are different.
Obesity.
Diabetes.
Fatty liver disease.
Autoimmune disorders.
Cardiovascular disease.
Despite decades of increasingly precise nutrient measurements, these chronic diseases continue to rise. If counting nutrients were the whole story, this should not be happening. A possible explanation is that something fundamental may be missing from the way we think about food.
Food Is Not Just Fuel
One possible explanation is deceptively simple. Food does not merely provide energy or random combinations of nutrients.
It provides information.
Every time we eat, an extraordinary cascade of biological signaling begins. Taste receptors in the mouth transmit sensory data to the brain, preparing the digestive system for incoming nutrients. Hormones begin to shift even before food reaches the stomach. The gut adjusts enzyme production, gastric motility, and absorption patterns in anticipation of the meal.
These responses are not random. They reflect predictions shaped by millions of years of evolutionary experience with real foods and their biological patterns. But the signaling does not stop with the host.
Our evolutionary partners—the trillions of microbes living in the gut—also interpret the incoming dietary message. These microbes metabolize components of food into thousands of secondary molecules that influence metabolism, immune signaling, vascular biology, and even brain chemistry.
In this sense, food is not merely digested. It is decoded by a complex ecological network.
A Microbial Example: When Context Changes Meaning
One of the best-studied examples of this process involves a molecule called trimethylamine, or TMA. Certain gut bacteria convert dietary compounds such as choline and carnitine—nutrients found in foods like eggs and red meat—into TMA. The liver then converts TMA into another molecule called TMAO. Elevated TMAO levels have been strongly correlated with the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
But the story does not end there.
Researchers discovered that a natural compound, 3,3-dimethyl-1-butanol (DMB), can inhibit microbial TMA production. DMB is not a drug—it occurs naturally in foods like extra-virgin olive oil and red wine, both staples of the Mediterranean diet. In experimental models, DMB suppressed TMA formation and reduced TMAO levels.
In other words, the same nutrient signal can produce very different biological outcomes depending on context and the arrangement of constituents. The meaning of food does not come from nutrients alone. It emerges from interactions among dietary compounds, microbial ecosystems, metabolic pathways, and host physiology.
Seen this way, food behaves less like fuel and more like information. And, as with all information systems, interpretation depends on the structure, timing, content, and the receiver.
To understand that idea, it helps to think about something humans understand very well: language.
Next week, Segment 2: The Grammar of Food
Amazon Link to Dinner with God
