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Elena Shekhova, PhD

@lumipie.com

2.7K followers 1.5K following 350 posts

Exploring & visualizing data on nutrition, health, and eating habits: lumipie.com Interests: 🧬 Biology 📊 Data Viz 📢 SciComm 💻 Coding Prev: University of Copenhagen, MRC for Medical Mycology, Leibniz:HKI Curator of the scientific #Nutrition feed 📍🇩🇰

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Feb 14

🧪🍎📃 #medsky

Have you heard about Denis Burkitt, The Fibre Man?

Way back in 1971, he published important observations that revolutionized our understanding of nutrition and health.

Were Denis's theories confirmed 50 years later? Are little bugs involved? Let’s find out in this 🧵 (1/13)

The cover of the book entitled Fiber Man: The Life Story of Dr Denis Burkitt by Brian Kellock published in 1985

The title page of the publication from 1971 "Epidemiology of cancer of the colon and rectum" .

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 4d

🍎📃

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 5d

That is why the EAT-Lancet Comm. says that their planetary diet recommendations are flexible. In many Western countries, supplies of animal-based foods can be reduced, while in low-income countries they can be increased to some extent to improve diet diversity and avoid malnutrition.

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 5d

I am planning to write this up on one page with several charts. There, I also plan to chart food supplies in countries with low GDP, where the situation is very different.

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 5d

This is very interesting. What other metric would you use instead of GDP? My idea here is to show that in so-called “wealthy” countries, where, in principle, there are means to provide access to all types of food (both domestic and imported), animal-based (and sugar-rich!) foods are pushed the most.

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 7d

Thank you so much for the feedback! 🙏🙏🙏

I agree, I should find a way to highlight the link between GDP and supplies. It’s definitely something to keep in mind for the next chart 🧐

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 8d

Here’s a good paper that discusses this pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

The Safe and Effective Use of Plant-Based Diets with Guidelines for Health Professionals

Plant-based diets, defined here as including both vegan and lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets, are growing in popularity throughout the Western world for various reasons, including concerns for human health ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 8d

Data is from FAOSTAT: www.fao.org/faostat/en/#...
Reference diet is Planetary Lancet Diet: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4
Data preparation in R: github.com/ElenaShekhov...
Chart was made with React and D3

FAOSTAT

FAOSTAT provides free access to food and agriculture data for over 245 countries and territories and covers all FAO regional groupings from 1961 to the most recent year available.

www.fao.org

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 8d

🧪🍎📃
It only took me 500 years to finish this 📊, but here it is 🎉

Grocery shops in many wealthy countries are oversupplied with animal-based foods. They stock far more meat and dairy than we need for human and planetary health.

🔗 www.lumipie.com/data-vis/pla...

Data visualization comparing national food supplies in high-income countries (based on GDP per capita) with planetary health intake targets. Radial charts for 12 countries (including Ireland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, Australia, Norway, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia) show that supplies of animal-based foods, especially meat and dairy, consistently exceed recommended levels of intake. Bars below each chart compare grams of plant-based, animal-based, and fats & oils in total daily supply per person. Data is from FAOSTAT (2022)

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 9d

🧪🍎📃
In South Africa, when people move to cities, their diets become similar to a “Western” one, with more energy-dense foods, animal protein, and fat.

This shift changes the diversity of gut microbes, increasing bacteria previously linked to higher colorectal cancer risk.

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Figure 1a from the study (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46265-0): Analysis of fecal microbiota by 16 S rRNA gene sequencing from healthy rural and urban Xhosa individuals showing A bacterial community richness or Shannon Effective as indices for α-diversity,

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 12d

What a fantastic study! 🧪
And such an informative 🧵 on how a century of evolution shaped antimicrobial resistance, with plasmid fusions driving its global spread.

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 16d

This study does not indicate that late breakfast causes health issues. Instead, there is a link between health issues and late breakfast. Probably, people who are sick are less likely to wake up early and eat breakfast.

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 17d

You made me google "drunken hedgehog," since I wasn’t sure I would recognize one, but yeah, you really can tell.

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 17d

Thanks, I had a good laugh!
I feel like there’s a lot of wishful thinking in that research, since it’s obvious that accidentally consuming alcohol from ripe, nutrient-rich fruit is not the same as intentionally drinking beer or vodka 🙃
Adding this to the science feed 🧪

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 17d

I agree, crispy tofu is underrated!

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 18d

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Food impacts on species extinction risks can vary by three orders of magnitude - Nature Food

What we eat, as well as where and how it is grown, impacts species extinction risks through agricultural land use. Using a new global biodiversity impact data product, this study estimates how many sp...

www.nature.com

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 18d

🧪🍎📃
Important new study:

Animal products, especially beef, pose much higher extinction risks for wildlife than grains, legumes, or vegetables. This means shifting land use toward more plant-based diets can give greater opportunities to restore biodiversity and help save species from extinction.

Figure 4 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01224-w: The extinction impacts of average daily per capita food consumption in the United States for consumption in 2021, the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet and hypothetical vegetarian and vegan diets. Baseline intake values are taken from FAO data27. The intake of spices, coffee, cocoa, tea and maté remains constant across diets. The EAT–Lancet diet is the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, designed to be consistent with health requirements and planetary boundaries51. The vegetarian and vegan diets are based on ‘Eatwell’ plates, with constituent commodities consumed in the same ratios that they currently are within each group53,54,55,56. Each reference diet is scaled to have the same number of calories as the baseline, which in theory accounts for food waste and overconsumption, probably overestimating their impacts.

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 20d

This has something to do with blood metabolites. The diet may promote more metabolites with protective effect on brain health ⤵️

Fig 5:a Schematic of the two-sample MR and colocalization analyses. Genetic instruments were selected for 657 metabolites and 133 metabolite ratios from a published GWAS. Summary statistics for overall dementia, AD, vascular dementia and cognitive performance were also obtained from published GWASs (Methods). Two-sample MR was performed to identify putative causal relationships between metabolites or ratios and cognitive outcomes, followed by colocalization analysis for the causal associations with an FDR < 0.05. b, Identification of numerous putative causal interrelationships of various metabolites, metabolite ratios and cognitive outcome using genetic instruments. The chord diagram displays causal relationships with an FDR < 0.05 from MR analyses using Wald ratio, inverse variance-weighted or MR Egger methods, where each arc represents an identified link between a metabolite or ratio and a cognitive outcome. Arcs and nodes are color coded by the HMDB superclasses. c, Colocalization analyses strengthening evidence of causality, suggesting that the identified putative causal relationships between metabolites or ratios and cognitive outcomes have potential shared causal variants and biology. Putative causal relationships, represented by the odds ratios (ORs) or β coefficients with 95% CIs, are shown for associations with FDR < 0.05 and colocalization signals. Bayesian colocalization analysis was performed within the ±500-kb region around a genetic instrument (Methods). If multiple instruments were used, a causal association was reported if the metabolite or ratio and cognitive outcomes colocalized at least one genetic locus. Colocalization signals were reported for a locus if the conditional probability of colocalization, PP.H4/(PP.H3 + PP.H4), was >70%, where PP.H3 is posterior probability that the two traits have independent causal variants and PP.H4 is the posterior probability that the two traits share a single causal variant.

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 20d

🧪🍎📃
Even with a genetic predisposition, not everyone will develop dementia. Various factors play a role.

This study suggests that people who are APOE4 homozygotes, the group at highest genetic risk, may benefit the most from following a Mediterranean diet.
doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03891-5

Figure 3b from the publication "Interplay of genetic predisposition, plasma metabolome and Mediterranean diet in dementia risk and cognitive function": The protective association between adherence to the MedDiet and risk of dementia most pronounced among APOE4 homozygotes. Stratified HR and 95% CIs for dementia risk per a 1-unit increment in the MedDiet index score, categorized by the APOE4 genotype, were estimated from Cox PH models, with stratified P values annotated (unadjusted for multiple comparisons in the hypothesis-driven analysis). The analyses were conducted among NHS participants with genetic, dietary and dementia outcome data (n = 16,497).

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 22d

Fantastic work, congratulations! Let’s squeeze all the useful stuff from those oranges!

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 22d

Looks good! What technologies did you use to make it?

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Sep 5

Agree, combining different cancers into one outcome is problematic.
And lumping different food groups together isn’t ideal either. Classic example: UPFs and multimorbidity -- the overall risk was mainly driven by a few UPF types, while others showed no association.

Forest plot entitled "Associations between subgroups of ultra-processed food consumption and risk of cancer-cardiometabolic multimorbidity." From DOI: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2023.100771

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Sep 5

Yes, in addition to your points, summing up "HR = 0.95; 95% CI: 0.91–1.00; P = 0.04" as "animal protein may be mildly protective for cancer mortality" is misleading. The effect is very small, and the confidence interval includes the null, suggesting the possibility of no association. 🍎📃

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Sep 3

☹️ I haven’t bought anything from Nestlé in many years, and I wish more people would follow

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Sep 2

New #dataviz art in my home office!

Furry colleagues seem pleased. Or maybe not? 😀

#map #DogsOfBluesky #corgi #art

Canvas poster titled Dogs of All Nations Map

Two dogs resting together on a mat: a tricolored Cardigan Welsh Corgi and a black mixed-breed, likely a Border Collie–Labrador mix.

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · Sep 2

#stats 🧪