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