Thinking About the Complexity of Food Molecules, Nutrient Activation, and Diverse Biochemical Pathways.

The physiology of life is complex. The process of understanding its complexity necessarily required simplification and focus on the molecules and biochemical pathways required for life. This focus resulted in huge benefits for understanding life and disease. However, the simplification process itself led to missing or dismissing a lot of important physiology critical for health. The result has been a lack of recognition of many factors important to health, not just life, such as losing many plant molecules when food is grown chemically rather than organically, focusing on major pathways while missing critical secondary pathways, and lacking recognition that single nucleotide variation evolved to adapt to widely diverse food molecules and vitamers. This editorial focuses on the complexity of food molecules, nutrient activation, and biochemical pathways that have thus far lacked recognition, with particular emphasis on the B6 vitamers.