SUBJECT THEORY: A NEW PARADIGM OF NUTRITION AND HEALTH. ARTICLE 1. BIOLOGICAL BASIS, META-COMPARTMENTS, PARAMETER VECTOR AND NEED FOR CONTROL

Nutrition determines up to 70% of the state of health, but there is still no fundamental scientific theory explaining the mechanism of this influence. Modern dietetics evaluates food mainly by its calorie content and macronutrient content, ignoring tens of thousands of molecular compounds, as well as toxic agents formed in nature, during processing and storage. This creates a gap between the real chemical composition of the product and its metabolic effect. The present work introduces and substantiates the concept of subjectabols, i.e. molecular compounds of food, from which the body independently synthesizes its own active metabolites. The fundamental difference between subjectabols and metaboles changes the understanding of nutrition: food does not supply ready-made nutrients, but serves as a source of precursors, substrates, cofactors and signaling molecules for the internal metabolic factory. The theory of subjectabols has two inseparable directions. The first is subjectabols and their role in maintaining metabolic diversity in 18 meta-compartments of the body. The second is food toxicants: chemical compounds that are initially present in food raw materials or formed in them in the process of technological processing, storage and culinary preparation. They include three classes: native (natural) toxicants, technological (process-induced) toxicants and external contaminants. The central ontological position of the theory is that a product is not a category, but a vector of parameters. Only the entire set of parameters — name, variety, origin, method of production, condition, freshness, storage conditions — determines the metabolic profile. The product is evaluated according to two independent axes: the density of objects (PP) - the number of useful molecular species; the toxicity index (IT) - the number of harmful ones. The product profile is recorded as PP/IT. Any product is both beneficial and harmful; there is no absolutely safe food. Only a reasonable choice determines what a person eats, but not everyone can be a biochemist. Therefore, a public methodology for assessing the benefits and toxicity of products, accessible to a layman, is necessary. The work is based on the latest research from 2024–2026 in the field of nutritional metabolomics, metabolomic clocks of aging, flaxoomics, multiomics approaches to personalized nutrition, and food toxicology.