As the second quarter of the 21st century unfolds, experts are examining the state of nutrition as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline looms with five years remaining. To achieve these targets, a new paper outlines key goals for nutrition science from 2025 to 2030.
The Frontiers in Nutrition publication discusses the interconnectedness between nutrition, food security, and sustainability in complex food systems affected by shocks, policies, and environmental limits. The researchers reveal how these modern factors impact nutrition science and shape research agendas.
Nutrition Insight speaks to co-author Johannes le Coutre, professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia, to explore the 2030 nutrition science agenda proposed in the paper.
The agenda connects nutrition to trade and regulatory policies amid supply disruptions. It also delves into issues such as microplastic contamination. Meanwhile, AI advances, precision nutrition, and microbiome research are highlighted.
Food security as a complex system
Le Coutre, who is also field chief editor at Frontiers in Nutrition, explains that food security is a complex adaptive system that is shaped by shocks and governance. It is not determined by one factor, such as production.
“It emerges from interactions among farmers, processors, retailers, regulators, consumers, markets, infrastructure, and the environment. The paper argues that these interactions are non-linear, with feedback loops, trade-offs, and unexpected ripple effects.”
“Drought, war, shipping disruption, or price shocks in one place can quickly affect access and affordability elsewhere. Governance matters because it determines whether systems build resilience through diversity, redundancy, local capacity, adaptive learning, and protection of vulnerable groups or instead remain fragile and overly centralized,” he explains.
The relevance for researchers is important, because if systems are fragile, even high-quality innovations can fail due to disruptions. The paper authors argue that resilience should be a design criterion, not an afterthought.
De-globalization reshapes nutrition access
There is a trend of de-globalization, which is changing food availability and prices, observes Le Coutre’s team. For researchers, understanding how this affects what consumers can access and afford helps build cross-disciplinary awareness when designing dietary interventions or food policy research.
“Higher tariffs and reduced cross-border trade can limit access to fruits, vegetables, and protein sources, while also lowering purchasing power. This tends to hit low-income groups hardest, so nutrition inequity can widen.”
“At the same time, reduced imports of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) may create opportunities for healthier diets, but only where domestic food systems and nutrition policy are strong enough to support that shift,” Le Coutre comments. “In other words, de-globalization does not automatically improve diets or worsen them; the outcome depends heavily on domestic governance, regulation, and labeling policy.”
Nutrition Insight recently explored how trade is impacting nutrition security in a highly connected and interdependent world.
Diversifying diets and Indigenous ethnofoods
The paper lauds the rise of plant-based alternatives, driving shifts in diets. However, it warns of risks alongside opportunities.
“For plant-based foods, the article highlights both nutritional and food safety risks. Some products, especially plant-based milk alternatives, may have lower protein quality or deficits in vitamins B12 and B2, calcium, iodine, and fatty acid balance unless fortified,” explains Le Coutre.
“There are also contamination concerns, especially heavy metals and mycotoxins, with particular concern for toddlers.”
Although diversifying diets can support sustainability, researchers should pay attention to nutritional adequacy and safety, keeping pace with innovation to build evidence for regulators or consumers.
“Furthermore, for Indigenous foods, the risks are different: the issue is less that the foods are inherently unsafe and more that they are analytically under-studied, nutritionally under-characterized, and vulnerable to unfair exploitation,” notes Le Coutre.
“The paper stresses the need to protect cultural integrity, ensure fair benefit-sharing, and avoid regulatory barriers that block legitimate nutrient research.”
The researchers note that expanding the evidence on Indigenous foods can improve nutrition relevance globally, but it must be done within ethical and legal frameworks that respect communities.
Micro- and nanoplastic mitigation in food systems
The nutrition agenda urges action on tackling micro- and nanoplastics by integrating measurements into food safety systems such as HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points).
“The paper treats micro- and nanoplastics as an emerging food-system contaminant that is already widespread across agriculture, water, packaging, processing, and even indoor food preparation,” says Le Coutre.
“Human exposure is no longer speculative; plastics have been detected in blood, lungs, placenta, stool, brain, and bone. Although epidemiological causality is still incomplete, the article argues that waiting for perfect certainty would be unwise.”
He continues that since microplastics can enter the food chain at multiple points, plastics need to be addressed. For instance, in food safety management, process engineering, materials reform, packaging reform, and upstream environmental action, while HACCP addresses hazards before they reach the consumer.
The paper points out that emerging risks cannot be handled with laboratory findings and must be addressed with real operational tools to ensure science meets practice.
The nutrition AI gap
According to the paper, nutrition has been lagging in AI adoption compared to other fields because it lacks a foundational big-data layer.
“AI is only as good as the data infrastructure beneath it,” states Le Coutre. “The paper argues that AI-supported pattern recognition, precision nutrition, improved UPF classification, and context-specific dietary guidance all depend on high-resolution, comprehensive food composition databases.”
“These databases need to go beyond standard nutrient tables and include markers relevant to modern nutrition science, such as additives, processing characteristics, and other features that influence health outcomes. Without that foundation, AI cannot produce mechanistically grounded, validated, and equitable insights that work in real-world settings shaped by affordability, culture, and policy.”
Additional key areas
The paper also highlights a major shift in how regulations and policies treat food processing, calling for improved surveillance and translation into policy tools. These include warning labels, tax breaks, and limiting buying.
For researchers, this matters as some processing patterns drive health risks, meaning nutrition science needs methods and policies to keep up with growing consumption of UPFs. Other places for improvement include classification systems, surveillance tools, and policy evaluation frameworks.
Furthermore, the paper points to the need to translate precision nutrition into clinical application. For example, gathering data to understand how things work by linking omics data to biological processes and health outcomes.
“Those who bridge data science, biology, and application will shape the future of nutrition research,” advises the research paper’s editorial.
Moreover, the researchers say microbiome research needs a push toward causality — standardized methods, validated biomarkers, and harmonized repositories. Standardization can make results comparable and useful across studies.
Also, the researchers point to the importance of brain health, long COVID, and drug-driven dietary changes, such as GLP-1. These are important as they change population-level health shifts, with new eating patterns creating nutrition risks faster than an evidence base can catch up with. The paper’s accompanying editorial article calls for proactive research design.
Lastly, the researchers urge treating nutrition misinformation as a public health threat. If misinformation overtakes evidence, then science needs better and faster communication. They add that the gap between researcher knowledge and public belief is a research problem itself.