The Mehta Research Group in the College of Human Ecology focuses on developing nutritional strategies that can be implemented to “prevent disease, to reduce the severity of disease or to mitigate its consequences,” said the group’s principal investigator, Prof. Saurabh Mehta, nutritional sciences.
The group conducts research in improving point-of-care diagnostics, or tests that can be performed outside of laboratories to give medical insights. In the context of nutrition, point-of-care diagnostics can help diagnose nutrient deficiencies and how much of a specific nutrient a patient needs. The group currently works primarily in India, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa with vulnerable populations such as women, children and those suffering from illness, according to their website.
In addition to leading the research group, Mehta also serves as the founding director of the Cornell Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition and Health. According to Mehta, the center was established to conduct research based on the foundational work of the Mehta Research Group. The center performs interdisciplinary research in nutrition and technology to aid the community with the products of their studies, according to their website.
Mehta stated that improving accessibility of point-of-care diagnostics plays a large role in promoting precision nutrition. Precision nutrition is the practice of accommodating individuals’ dietary needs based on their biology, response to foods, life stage, taste preferences, culture, religion and socioeconomic status.
Point-of-care diagnostics make it possible to test individuals first, then use individualized nutrition strategies to treat different people for their different needs. Point-of-care devices for nutrition can incorporate technology, like mobile devices and apps, with tests that use blood or saliva to measure someone’s nutrient levels and determine their state of health.
According to Mehta, the group started creating point-of-care devices to measure nutritional status in partnership with Prof. David Erickson, engineering, about 12 to 13 years ago. The group hopes to further interdisciplinary collaboration at Cornell to build improved devices for nutrient delivery.
The research group was involved in developing the device AnemiaPhone, which uses a drop of blood to determine if an individual has iron deficiency, a cause of anemia — making it an essential tool to screen for the condition. In 2024, Cornell signed an agreement with the Indian government so that AnemiaPhone could be used by public health programs in India to test women and children for anemia.
Mehta elaborated on the benefits of testing for and treating iron-deficient individuals, rather than implementing a treatment for everyone.
“A, you are saving resources on that treatment [and] B, you are avoiding unnecessary side effects, and you're ensuring more response and adherence to any program that you have,” Mehta said.
According to the National Institutes of Health National Research Report, malnutrition is a leading cause of death worldwide. Mehta explained how seeing nutrition as a top risk factor for mortality led him to pursue nutrition research. Since diet is a modifiable risk factor, better nutrition has the potential to largely improve public health.
“Nutrition is not easy to modify, but I felt like it's something that might be able to move the needle in terms of public health impact,” Mehta said. “And I think that's why people should pay more attention to nutrition research.”
The research group’s future goals include making sure their work in point-of-care diagnostics is “scalable and implemented,” Mehta said.
In addition, the integration of computer science and artificial intelligence in the nutrition field has the potential to improve data collection, analysis and inference in precision nutrition, according to Mehta. AI can help take into consideration the complex multimodal data collected over different disciplines in different forms that is used to determine individuals’ unique dietary needs, he added.
Through a recent NIH grant for AI training, the Mehta Research Group hopes to provide more opportunities for the next generation of scientists.
“We are trying to create a community where we have people who are trained in both computer science and [in] nutrition science so that they can actually make a difference with some of this work … that is happening in the precision nutrition space across the U.S., as well as the globe,” Mehta said.
Samantha Huey Ph.D. ’20 was part of the Mehta Research Group as a graduate student and now works as a research associate and group lead for nutrition in the Joan Klein Jacobs Center for Precision Nutrition. She is continuing her work in nutrition with a primary focus on maternal and child nutrition.
“Maternal and child nutrition, it’s really at the crux of everyone's nutrition. If women and children aren't healthy, then really no one is going to be healthy,” Huey said.
One persistent issue in maternal and child nutrition is the prevalence of anemia, according to Huey, who also told The Sun that a precision nutrition approach could consider more variables involved in the issue of anemia and help identify why other interventions have fallen short.
Huey contributed to a narrative review published in the journal Nature Communications in August, which explored the ways AI and machine learning technology could be used to improve maternal and child health and nutrition in low and middle income communities. The review included examples of existing technology that helps determine nutritional status through anthropometry, biomarkers, clinical symptoms of malnutrition and dietary intake.
The review also shared some of these technologies’ limitations, or what has yet to be improved. For example, Huey stated there have been studies about using gut bacteria to determine how much of something an individual eats, but there is a lack of representation of mothers and children in this research.
The Joan Klein Jacobs Center strives to make nutrition research accessible to the general public, according to Huey. They communicate research through plain language summaries of their work, podcasts, and their blog. They also develop large language model platforms to allow readers to more easily search for information in their systematic reviews.
“Nutrition research is very prone to misinformation and also ambiguity,” Mehta said. “So I think people understanding a little bit about the nuances in nutrition will also give them the ability to parse out … which [messages in the media] are the ones to trust and which ones not.”
