# The nutrition toolbox permits in silico generation, analysis, and optimization of personalized diets through metabolic modelling

## TL;DR

The Nutrition Toolbox helps create and optimize personalized diets by modeling their effects on human and gut microbiome metabolism.

## Contribution

The Nutrition Toolbox converts food items into metabolic compositions for use in whole-body metabolic models.

## Key findings

- The toolbox uses open-source databases to translate food items into metabolite-level diets.
- It enables minimal dietary changes to achieve desired metabolic shifts in humans and microbiomes.
- The tool is implemented in MATLAB and is publicly available for further use and development.

## Abstract

Nutrition is an important factor in human health, used to alleviate or prevent symptoms of various diseases. However, the effects of nutrition on the gut microbiome and human metabolism are not well understood. Whole-body metabolic models (WBMs) have been applied to study relationships between regional diets and human/microbiome metabolism. This method requires diets to be defined at the metabolite level, rather than the food item level, which has gated the application of personalized diets to WBMs.

We developed the Nutrition Toolbox, which leverages open-source databases containing metabolite composition for over ten thousand food items to convert food items into their metabolic composition to create in silico diets. Additionally, when used with a previously published nutrition algorithm, minimal changes to a diet can be identified to achieve desirable shifts in human and microbiome metabolism. Taken together, we believe that the Nutrition Toolbox can help to understand the effects of nutrition on human metabolism and has the potential to contribute to personalized nutrition.

The Nutrition Toolbox is written in MATLAB. The code can be found at https://github.com/opencobra/cobratoolbox. A tutorial explaining the code is available in the COBRA toolbox and as view-only supplementary tutorial. Details on installing the COBRA toolbox are available at https://opencobra.github.io/cobratoolbox/stable/installation.html.