[2023 Sep – 2024 May]

In Hungary – as in most regions of the world – the main public health problems are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and obesity, which is becoming the number one public health problem due to its important role in the development of diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. These illnesses and their complications are responsible for the death of around 100,000 people every year in Hungary alone, placing a significant burden on society. The number of preventable deaths in Hungary is one of the highest in the EU: compared to the EU average, twice as many people die in Hungary as a result of preventable causes of mortality.

A significant part of these leading causes of death can be traced back to environmental and lifestyle factors. The pivotal health role of diet has been well supported for decades by nutrition-related research, which revealed the role of calories, sugar, fat, protein, vitamins and other biochemical factors in deficiency diseases, on basic metabolic pathways, and in many other chronic diseases. Our current understanding of the way biochemicals in food affect health is largely limited to a few hundred components that different food composition databases track in the food supply (EuroFIR: cca. 750 components listed, cca. 270 components tracked; USDA: cca. 200 components tracked). Yet, when it comes to the composition of the food we consume, these food components represent only a tiny fraction of the ~70,000 distinct definable biochemicals reported by FooDB, which itself is expected to be only a fraction of the total composition of the food supply. This very incomplete knowledge of the complete biochemical composition of foods hinders the research community from discovering the mechanistic effects and ultimate roles of the thousands of untracked molecules in our health, whether through the microbiome, through their role in the body’s metabolism, or through the various molecular regulatory mechanisms of human cells. 

To solve this problem, joining the international project on food exposome (Foodome), a Hungarian pilot project (Hoodome) had been initiated, led by Maven Seven Network Research Inc. (Boston, USA), in collaboration with Syreon Research Institute, proposing a Big Data strategy for the creation and experimental validation of a high-resolution collection of the biochemical composition of foods. The Hoodome project aims to create a unified database for Hungarian agricultural and food products. Once this has been built, the complete chemical composition of the most important food products in Hungary will be available, enabling the research and start-up communities to use the most modern database. This could change the direction of food and nutrition research as well as set out the future development direction in the health and agricultural industry.