Jasmin Hume’s Take on Nutrition: Generally Recognized As Nonsense

Updated

By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

As the self-proclaimed “world’s leading expert in AI-driven ingredient innovation,” it is worth taking a closer look at Shiru Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jasmin Hume. As noted on the World Economic Forum’s website, Hume, a protein engineer by training with a PhD in materials chemistry—steeped in computational methods and protein design in biomedicine, not food—is defining new paths for applying artificial intelligence to molecular discovery and commercialization, and thus reshaping the future of how companies like hers make what the world consumes. In other words, her core mission is to apply AI to the natural world’s own repertoire of proteins to develop a myriad of new products. But hold on! With a deceptively humble mission of “find natural ingredients that make better food,” we must wonder, did we ask Hume to do this?

So who is Jasmin Hume? The stories currently circulating about her start off respectable enough. She’s a PhD protein engineer who used to work in the plant-based food sector, claims she became disillusioned with the pace of progress, and so she turned instead to machine learning. Her goal? To build an AI platform capable of scanning millions of protein sequences from plants, fungi, and microbes to predict which ones might behave in a helpful way in food. Whether it be emulsifying it, structuring it, or, as of late, tinkering with human metabolism. Which is what has put Hume on the map, and on Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2024” list.

Instead of inventing brand-new synthetic molecules, Shiru mines large databases of naturally occurring proteins and uses machine learning to predict those that might have valuable applications in food, cosmetics, agriculture, and so on. At first glance, Hume’s endeavor seems like one that most people would be happy about. After all, real food is optimal, and fewer artificial fillers, synthetic molecules, and processing is best. But upon digging a bit deeper into Hume’s mission, a more complex operation is revealed. One that hinges on synthetic deliverance disguised as nature’s best.

As if in the twilight zone—or, more appropriately, the precipice of transhumanism—during a recent interview at the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Hume said that HHS Secretary RFK Jr.’s fantastic, health-based food industry reforms, centered around cutting out food dyes and synthetic additives, will ultimately hurt the consumer because the food will not have proper nutritional value. Hume made the curious claim that removing these known toxins from our food would somehow deprive us of “nutrition and value.” What? Hume cleverly frames the growing public concern over ultra-processed foods—notably those banned in other countries but still approved in the US—as a threat not only to industry, but to consumers and our beloved Mother Earth. Her worry? She claims that if we remove lab-created additives, there will be nothing left to replace them. She adds that without a fast-track system to usher in new ingredients (through AI, of course), our food supply will suffer.

More tellingly, during her speech, Hume laments about potential reforms to the GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) system, which currently allows private companies to self-certify the safety of their own ingredients with little to no oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Hmmm. The freedom to self-certify has most certainly played a role in the ultra-processed, toxin-ridden state of our food supply. Yet, according to Hume, the end of GRAS self-regulation will be a regulatory bottleneck that could paralyze innovation. Still, what she calls a bottleneck is also what many in the natural health world describe as long-overdue accountability.

We should all be wary of Hume’s strange inversion of logic, implying that whole, unprocessed foods might be less nutritious without the very additives that have been quietly and methodically poisoning us for decades. Read that again. In Hume’s world, nutritional value does not come from real nourishment, but rather from optimized, technocratic fillers blessed by her algorithm and waved through a GRAS loophole. According to her, the problem isn’t that human food has drifted too far from nature. Instead, the problem is that we might be forced to inch back to it. It makes no sense unless the agenda isn’t centered around real health.

And now, on top of her quest to integrate AI technology to manipulate our food supply, let’s circle back to what recently thrust Hume into the spotlight, and as previously mentioned, onto TIME Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2024” list. Because, while food texture with the help of AI is splendid, Hume notes that what the industry really wants is hunger control. And she believes she’s found the holy grail of that control in a protein that can mimic the GLP-1 effect.

For those still blissfully unacquainted with the acronym, GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1) is a hormone produced in your gut to regulate appetite and blood sugar. It is the target of blockbuster weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which facilitate weight loss but also have significant risks and dangerous side effects. So, Hume and Shiru’s AI engine is on a mission to find “natural” ingredients that can stimulate the same receptors as Big Pharma’s weight-loss cash cow, but without the hassle of the FDA breathing down its neck. Hume explained, “If we can find food-based ingredients that mimic the impact of GLP-1 drugs, but in a way that supports natural hunger reduction… why wouldn’t we want to do that?”

Why indeed. The idea is seductive, and surely quite profitable. Simply take the wisdom out of nature, layer it with the computational ability of AI, and who knows, they may come up with a way to manipulate kale to kill food cravings. Or so the marketing goes. But the problem is that Hume’s entire framework rests upon simulation over integration. Shiru isn’t working with whole foods or synergistic nutritional food systems, as it aims to support weight loss. Instead, it is working with isolated molecules predicted to behave like pharmaceutical agents. In other words, find the part that mimics the drug, strip it from its original context, reproduce it at scale, and deliver it under a halo of wholesome naturalness. Simply put, instead of trusting the body’s inherent ability to self-regulate through whole, coherent nourishment, Hume and Shiru have decided the better path is to trick our symbiotic physiology with its AI database. No, thank you.

 

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Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

Tracy Beanz is an investigative journalist, Editor-in-Chief of UncoverDC, and host of the daily With Beanz podcast. She gained recognition for her in-depth coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, breaking major stories on the virus’s origin, timeline, and the bureaucratic corruption surrounding early treatment and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Tracy is also widely known for reporting on Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden), a landmark free speech case challenging government-imposed censorship of doctors and others who presented alternative viewpoints during the pandemic.