There is no 'planet B' and if there was, it would be very far away and likely not as liveable and beautiful as Mother Earth. So, we better take care of our unique home. The two major challenges in preserving a healthy human life on a healthy planet are sustainable generation and consumption of energy and food. This article is about the latter.
In the Anthropocene, humanity faces enormous environmental challenges. Our increasing population, at eight billion today and projected to reach around ten billion by 2100, places stress on land, water and biodiversity and accelerates climate change. We need both an overhaul and upgrade of our food and healthcare system, with the converging revolutions in biotechnology and information science presenting substantial opportunities.
Healthy ageing and wellbeing-founded longevity are deeply rooted human desires and increasingly entitling research programs on human health maintenance and disease prevention. Nutrition encompasses e.g. the management of global food supplies, precision nutrition to optimize individual health, and the exploration of bioactive compounds in natural food sources. Modern nutritional science must support human health and wellbeing, help prevent disease, and extend the health span concomitant with increasing life expectancies.
Nutrition science is thereby progressing toward a systems-based, translational approach. This (r)evolution requires the development of sustainable food systems, healthcare systems that balance efficiency with affordability, and nutritional and dietary plans tailored to diverse consumer and patient needs and demographics. An efficient and cost-effective healthcare system should integrate comprehensive nutritional strategies to augment and complement the traditional pharmaceutical interventions.
Nutrition Science has evolved from classical surveys and clinical trials, and from reductionist designs to Systems Nutrition, which is situated at the centre of cross-sector domains: The One Health concept is the guiding principle for healthy humans and animals on a healthy planet. The Planetary Health Diet serves as an “owner’s manual” for a food system capable of healthily nourishing ten billion people on Earth without exhausting natural resources. Such a Food System requires integrated approaches along the entire value chain.
Holistic bioanalytics capture the complexity of food components and their molecular effects. Together with artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and computation, these new technologies also propel Digital Health. Genomics technologies reshape nutrition at the science level by delivering biomarkers, diagnostic signatures, and mechanistic insights into how foods work on health and wellbeing. These generate big data for food and nutrition, populating knowledge bases from which machine learning can draw learnings and make predictions about nutrients, bioactives, and their functions.
But the ultimate challenges lie up- and downstream: all these developments must be rooted in nutrition and health education, so that the next generation can take good care of human and planetary health; and the consumer must be empowered to take better informed, and thereby healthier and more sustainable decisions. This requires for example science-grounded apps that inform about own health as well as healthfulness and sustainability of food purchase and consumption, ideally right at the point and time of decision.
Nature can teach us so much if we listen better: thanks to millions of years of molecular evolution, nature has come up with a bioactive answer to many, if not most, of our questions about human, animal and planetary health. These natural bioactives, especially when derived from sustainable plant and food sources, provide molecular solutions to nutritionally or pharmaceutically actionable chronic or acute conditions. To leverage this treasure, and to use nature’s huge “library”, we must “find the right sentence in the right book on the right shelf, and this fast” – because humanity in the Anthropocene cannot afford the evolutionary timescale to meet today’s sustainability challenges.
Yet bioactive discovery and validation has traditionally been inefficient. Early discoveries were serendipitous, based on observing health issues coinciding with lacking bioactives: the classic example is scurvy occurring in seafarers due to missing vitamin C. High-throughput screening represented the first systematic large-scale approach, based on sophisticated isolation, purification and analytical techniques, as well as robotics, multiplexing and miniaturization. However, without defined benefit targets and with purity not always concurring with efficacy, it hasn't delivered expected consumer and patient solutions.
As a consequence, true innovation in the field of natural bioactives has remained scarce; instead, the reformulation and adaptation of known compounds remain more common than genuinely new molecular solutions: most consumer health companies develop variants of known compounds rather than molecularly new solutions, constrained by challenging regulatory environments for new chemical entities and the ethical retreat from animal testing. Artificial intelligence can help unlock these bottlenecks by prediction of bioactive functions and sources, thereby drastically reducing the number of laboratory experiments. This requires clear benefits defined upfront, flowing from design-first approaches rather than untargeted bottom-up shotgun or screening strategies.
Looking toward 2030 and beyond, we can identify specific breakthroughs poised for global impact. These are not distant dreams but emerging realities where technology itself is no longer the primary limitation and the One Health Challenge in the Anthropocene must be met. At the same time, demographic, agricultural, and cultural context are always important to improving food systems and advancing nutrition and sustainability, in different geographies.
In agriculture, vertical farming is emerging as a competitive alternative, in places where solar energy is abundant and inexpensive; such “indoor agriculture” can work in arid and deserted areas with solar-powered water desalination. Urban farming is bringing food attention back into cities while greening and cooling them. Agro-photovoltaics are being leveraged for combined land use producing both energy and food. Precision farming with smart irrigation and fertilization is reducing water and chemical use. In food production, precision fermentation and alternative proteins, e.g. from algae and insects, are being developed and applied. In science and technology, AI for prediction of bioactive function and source, plus AI and microfluidics for high-throughput in vivo testing are drastically shortening the path from discovery via validation to application.
Despite the daunting sustainability challenges for humanity in the Anthropocene, my take-home message is encouraging: while business-as-usual is not an option, we (should) know what to do and we have the tools – we are facing an implementation rather than a knowledge problem.
References:
Kussmann M: “A Google Earth Perspective on Nutrition, Health and Sustainability” in Elsevier’s ‘Encyclopaedia of Food Security and Sustainability, 2nd ed. 2026 eds. Berry EM, Ferranti P. https://elseviermrw1.mpslimited.com/SftpDownloadApi_MRW/download?file=FSS2_00066.pdf
Kussmann M, Berciano Benitez S, Hayek M; Frontiers Nutrition 2024 (11) 1467576: “Nutrition for humanity in the Anthropocene – for healthier people on a healthier planet”. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39246398/
Berciano Benitez S, Figueiredo J, Brisbois T, Alford S, Koecher K, Eckhouse S, Ciati R, Kussmann M, Ordovas JM, Stebbins K, Blumberg JB. Frontiers Nutrition 2022 (9) 979665: “Precision Nutrition: Maintaining Scientific Integrity and Realizing Market Potential”. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36118748/
Kaput J, Pontes Monteiro J, Morine M, Kussmann M: „Personalised Nutrition“ in Elsevier’s Reference Collection in Biomedical Sciences 2022: “Comprehensive Precision Medicine”. Eds: Ramos K, Slikker W. Personalized nutrition - ScienceDirect
About the Author
Dr. Martin Kussmann is a scientist and research leader specialising in sustainable nutrition, human and planetary health. He is Head of Science at the Competence Center for Nutrition (KErn) in Bavaria, Lecturer at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and Founder and CEO of Kussmann Biotech GmbH.
A trained biochemist with a 30-year career across nutrition, biotechnology and academia, he has held professorships at EPF Lausanne, Aarhus University and Auckland University and has published more than 200 publications. His work focuses on advancing healthier and more sustainable food systems through science and innovation.