An Entirely New View of Diet
How FoodSeq-FLOW reveals what communities are really eating
Durham, N.C.(July 20, 2026) — Poor diet is a leading driver of chronic disease, and food insecurity affects more than 47 million people in the U.S., yet public officials still have no fast, objective way to track what communities actually eat. A forthcoming paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) demonstrates a new way to uncover population-level dietary patterns using municipal wastewater samples. Lead investigators Mengyi Dong (Virginia Tech), Lawrence David (Duke University), and Rachel Noble (UNC-Chapel Hill) employed a DNA-sequencing technique, known as FoodSeq-FLOW, to analyze wastewater from 21 communities in North Carolina, encompassing roughly 2.1 million people. Using FoodSeq-FLOW, the researchers could identify dietary plant and animal species from residual DNA in wastewater.
[Check out a special feature story in The New York Times on this research.]
Some initial findings link diet to income, culture, geography, and season:
Beer consumption and discretionary income
Tropical fruits and foreign-born populations
Local seafood consumption and coastal geography
Seasonal shifts, such as turkey peaking around Thanksgiving
“What we found might sound very intuitive or obvious: People eat more turkey in November; they’re more likely to consume local fish if they live close to the coast. But historically there’s been little empirical data to support these beliefs,” says Lawrence David, co-author and founder of Edible Atlas, the research group behind FoodSeq-FLOW. “By leveraging DNA from wastewater, we can verify or disprove these assumptions while also exploring the many factors that impact dietary habits.”
Dietary patterns, whether at an individual or population level, have been notoriously difficult to measure. Food diaries and surveys, as well as grocery store and restaurant sales, though helpful, are often incomplete and near-impossible to verify. They also miss lower-income households, homegrown produce, and self-caught fish. In contrast, this agnostic, genomics-based technology offers fast, quantifiable, and reliable data that captures an entire community, in aggregate, anonymously. Within the same study, researchers compared the community wastewater data to individual stool samples collected within the same geographic area, and the findings aligned, validating the approach.
This work has also sparked a collaborative effort between researchers and the community, with local activists advising scientists on how the research could benefit area residents. Over the years, wastewater has been analyzed for myriad purposes, such as tracking COVID infection rates, but it is rare for the community to be involved in the process.
Collecting dietary signals from wastewater costs an estimated $0.001 per individual, making FoodSeq-FLOW not only an insightful tool for public health and policy, but also a cost-effective one. And because wastewater surveillance was such a critical community-level indicator during the pandemic, many municipalities already have the infrastructure to collect these samples.
“Diet touches every aspect of our lives, making it both crucial to study and difficult to untangle from the many factors that impact and are impacted by it. This work marks the beginning of a new, more objective way of understanding diet, and the implications could be as far-reaching as public policy, resource management, food sourcing, health initiatives, intervention programs, and more,” Dr. David says. “We’re excited to continue refining and scaling FoodSeq-FLOW beyond our North Carolina home base.”