Nutrition & Health

The Nutrition and Health (NH) theme addresses current metabolomics-related challenges in demonstrating benefits of healthy nutrition for consumers. These challenges are addressed by four benefit-driven and one technology-driven project. Criteria for success are the ability to predict the (positive) response of consumers to interventions, discover new biomarkers, design and optimize personalised/segmented nutrition and underpin health claims at a mechanistic level. Within the NH projects the different technologies of the metabolomic pipeline are represented, and are deployed in an integrated manner. Several studies have now progressed through the metabolomics pipeline. The projects are now in the critical stage of interpreting the wealth of metabolic information that has been produced. Results obtained so far in the NH theme raised the awareness that in healthy individuals nutritional effects will be (generally small) within the homeostatic bandwidth. Current and future studies will have a stronger focus on challenge tests as a read-out of homeostatic resilience as a measure for health. This will be exploited in two follow-up research collaborations which have been initiated by the current partners in the NH theme.