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Let food be thy medicine

AI-designed “hyperfoods” can possibly help prevent cancer

The food we eat contains thousands of bioactive molecules, some of which are similar to anti-cancer drugs. Modern machine learning techniques can discover such components and help design nutrition that will let us live longer and healthier.

Michael Bronstein
Towards Data Science
14 min readSep 15, 2020

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Illustration: Bianca Dagheti.

This post was co-authored with Kirill Veselkov and Gabriella Sbordone and is based on the TEDx Lugano 2019 talk and the paper published in Nature journal Scientific Reports.

We now live longer than ever. Yet, we are not necessarily living healthier anymore: with a rapidly aging population, people are experiencing a continuous growth of chronic diseases such as cancer, metabolic, neurological, and heart disorders. This drives healthcare costs through the roof and puts a significant strain on the public health systems [1].

A large part of the problem resides in poor dietary choices. Unhealthy diets kill more than cigarettes and are responsible for 1 out of 5 deaths globally — in 2018, this amounted to nearly 11 million lives. Besides the obvious culprit — unhealthy highly processed food — a less obvious killer is the low intake of healthy…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Michael Bronstein
Michael Bronstein

Written by Michael Bronstein

DeepMind Professor of AI @Oxford. Serial startupper. ML for graphs, biochemistry, drug design, and animal communication.

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