Connecting nutrition composition measures to biomedical research

OBJECTIVES: Biomedical research is gaining ground on human disease through many types of “omics”, which is leading to increasingly effective treatments and broad applications for precision medicine. The majority of disease treatments still revolve around drugs and biologics. Although food is consumed in much higher quantities, we understand very little about how the human body metabolizes and uses the full range of nutrients, or how these processes affect human health and disease risk. Nutrient composition databases are used by dietitians to describe common consumer food products, but these fail to identify chemicals with the same nomenclature as metabolic pathways in basic life sciences research and with far less precision. Consumer-oriented nutrient compositions often describe generic substances (e.g. Sugars) while scientific reporting is often much more specific (e.g. Dextrose, Fructose, etc.). Integrating these two fields of research presents a difficult challenge for novel applications of precision nutrition. DATA DESCRIPTION: This data set provides a manually curated collection of nutrient identifiers from the USDA’s Nutrition Data Bases and maps them to PubChem (a resource for cheminformatics and drug discovery research), biomedical literature records in PubMed using Medical Subject Headings, biological pathways using the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology.