Have you ever wondered why do we combine ingredients in our recipes the way we do? Or for that matter, could we find scientific ways for altering diet to improve health? Our data-driven investigations aimed at probing patterns in traditional Indian recipes, in response to the first question, have led us to the discovery of a novel food pairing phenomenon in Indian cuisine. Our studies have revealed ‘culinary fingerprints’ of regional cuisines and role of spice as the molecular fulcrum of Indian recipes. Such data-driven explorations of food are opening new avenues for development of divergent applications in the domains of nutrition and health. One such direction is towards application of machine learning for ‘personalized nutrition’ that can potentially answer the second question, allowing us to leverage food as medicine. Ganesh Bagler is an interdisciplinary researcher working in the areas of complex systems, computational biology, bioinformatics, in silico drug discovery, and applications of data science to health and medicine. His data-driven investigations aimed at probing patterns in traditional Indian recipes have led to the discovery of a novel food pairing phenomenon in Indian cuisine. TEDx Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK0StoErSow Article elaborating the idea presented in the TEDx Talk: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leveraging-food-better-health-through-data-driven-ganesh-bagler

1. Leveraging food for better health through data-driven approaches
Article elaborating the idea presented in the TEDx talk
TEDx talk video is available on the YouTube TEDx Talks Channel.

2. Image Credits: Chloe Cushman

3. Image Credits: Chloe Cushman

4. 𝑓 × = 𝑧

6. Why do we eat what we eat?

7. Why do we combine ingredients
in our recipes the way we do?

8. Food Pairing Hypothesis
Ingredients that taste similar tend to be used together
in traditional recipes
Ahn et. al, “Flavor network and the principles of food pairing”, Scientific Reports (2011).
A Jain, NK Rakhi, G Bagler*, “Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine”, arXiv:1502.03815 (2015).

9. Recipes & Ingredients
2543 Traditional Indian Recipes (TarlaDalal)
Regional cuisines: Bengali, Gujarati, Jain, Maharashtrian,
Mughlai, Punjabi, Rajasthani, South Indian.

10. fla•vor = smell + taste
Olfactory
Gustatory

11. Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients

13. 𝑅𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑚 𝐶𝑢𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑒
Western Cuisines
Ahn et. al, Sci.Rep. (2011)
Uniform Food Pairing
Indian Cuisine
Jain et. al, PLoS ONE (2015)
Contrasting Food Pairing

15. ‘Contrasting Food Pairing’ in Indian Cuisine
A Jain, NK Rakhi, G Bagler*, “Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine”, arXiv:1502.03815 (2015).

16. 4
6
8
10
12
Food Pairing
Original recipes
Herb
Plant
Diary
Cereal/Crop
Nut/seed
Plant derivative
Fruit
Vegetable
Spice
Spices are key to the food pairing in Indian cuisine
A Jain, NK Rakhi, G Bagler*, “Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine”, arXiv:1502.03815 (2015).

18. A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, arXiv (2015); A Jain, NK Rakhi and G Bagler*, PLoS ONE (2015).
Best of 2015
MIT Technology Review

19. Molecular
Essence
Novel Recipe
Generation
Food
Formulations
Food-
Beverage
pairing
Hypothesis
Testing
Nutri-
Genomics
Food-
Disease
Association

20. ED Sonnenburg and JL Sonnenburg, Nature, 528, 484 (2015).
Zeevi et al., “Personalized nutrition by prediction of glycemic response”, Cell, 163, 1079 (2015).
Design personalized diet to
lower glucose levels
Gut Microbes
Body Mass Index
Blood tests
Questionnaires
Food diary
Personalized Nutrition

21. The discovery of a new dish confers
more happiness on humanity, than the
discovery of a new star.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
“
”
as seen in the canteen of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, circa 1998

22. To know about the questions pursued in our lab and opportunities, please visit:
http://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in