Extensive programmes around the world endeavour to measure and catalogue the composition of food. Here we analyse the nutrient content of the full US food supply and show that the concentration of each nutrient follows a universal single-parameter scaling law that accurately captures the eight orders of magnitude in nutrient content variability. We show that the universality is rooted in the biochemical constraints obeyed by the metabolic pathways responsible for nutrient modulation, allowing us to confirm the empirically observed scaling law and to predict its variability in agreement with the data. We propose that the natural nutrient variability in food can be quantitatively formalized. This provides a mathematical rationale for imputing missing values in food composition databases and paves the way towards a quantitative understanding of the impact of food processing on nutrient balance and health effects.

世界各地的广泛项目致力于测量和分类食物的成分。在这里，我们分析了美国全部食品供应的营养成分，并表明每种营养成分的浓度都遵循通用的单参数比例法则，该法则准确地捕捉了营养成分变化的八个数量级。我们表明，普遍性植根于负责营养调节的代谢途径所遵守的生化约束，使我们能够确认经验观察到的比例定律并预测其与数据一致的可变性。我们建议可以定量形式化食物中的天然营养变异性。