Zhang's group took microRNAs that affect cholesterol out of blood and put them into mice. They then blocked their effect with drugs.

Cholesterol levels plummeted.

Eating an Organism

There are a lot of chemicals inside animals. The same is true of plants. About half of antibiotics come from plants. While remaining fixed in the ground plants have to fight off fungi; bacteria; viruses; rickettsia; set up barriers to being eaten or destroyed by animals; and create all the complicated machinery of life.

So any time we eat a plant or animal we potentially ingest thousands of separate chemicals.

We can get some idea of the complexity of food from one extensively studied plant—tobacco.

Tobacco as Model

Analyses of tobacco plants usually find anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 separate chemicals. One is polonium 210—tobacco plants pick up radioactive fallout long resident in the atmosphere and concentrate it. The end result? When you light up you really light up. That means more lung cancers.

We should expect that "superfoods"—the organically colored foods presumably beloved by the media—to possess similar complexity, and influential chemicals.

Proteins and Carbohydrates

Food is necessary for life. From proteins we get the stuff to make our proteins; from fats, the critical molecules for lining cells and facilitating communication. Carbohydrates are both basic materials and fundamental fuels.

Yet simplifying food into carbohydrates, proteins and fats misses most of what they do. It's like knowing a closed box weights 3,000 pounds and contains iron, copper and other metals, but not knowing if it contains manhole covers, a Ferrari, or a cruise missile. And that's before you consider what happens when food hits your gut.

Your Gut's Response to Food

Consider:

Your gut has 100 trillion bacteria

Collectively they control 3.3 to 9 million separate genes—compared to your approximately 27,000

Give lactobacilli to mice as part of their diet and they are far more resistant to stress and induced depression than those without lactobacilli. Who knows what the other hundreds of other bacteria do? Tthey certainly affect autoimmune disease.

The Human Response—What You Do With Food

Moving after meals blocks digestion and decreases glucose and insulin peaks

Eat at night and you'll have higher glucose and blood fats

People eat more with friends than when alone—unless they're watching TV

Sleep less and you crave more fat and sugar

The Biological Meaning of Food

Food is complicated—and that's a good thing. Once we understand the many thousands of chemicals inside food and how they interact we should be able to more intelligently treat or prevent illness through intelligent cuisine—as East Asian medicine has tried to do for thousands of years. With greater computer crunching power we'll begin to understand why some cuisines, with their many interactions and sequences of foods, like the Mediterranean diet, seem to be healthy.

Food Information Content

It's time to think of food differently, as more than calories and carbs. Food changes us with its procarcinogens and RNA; the drug like effects of its innumerable chemicals; the changes it brings to the human gut ecosystem and its many trillions of different organisms.

It makes more sense to think of food information content. A sweet potato has dozens of different kinds of fat and proteins, but it's also got carotenoids; antioxidants; RNAs; chemicals that promote or decrease production of liver carcinogens.

In other words, foods are drugs, energy, structural materials, gene changers, weight makers and losers.

They're also pleasure, culture, fun, and love. That's the kind of information we can use.