Food reformulation: a growing challenge
Walk down any supermarket aisle, and you’ll see foods that look the same on the outside but are worlds apart on the inside. Something as simple as a wrap can contain three ingredients in Brand A: flour, extra virgin olive oil, water, salt, while Brand B includes 15 additives, flour, gums, emulsifiers, stabilisers, preservatives, sugars, saturated fats.
As microbiome science advances, we’ll need more thoughtful approaches to food reformulation. But we must avoid past mistakes. Replacing fat with sugar (and more recently, sugar with non-sugar sweeteners) taught us that quick fixes rarely work.
Modern metabolomics (the study of all the chemicals in our body and food that we make through all different processes) shows that food contains thousands of compounds, each interacting with our microbes in unique ways. Nutrition isn’t about demonising single ingredients, but it’s about understanding the whole picture.
