FNH-RI and COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic dominates our lives and work. That is also the case for the work on the Food, Nutrition and Health Research Infrastructure. One of the interesting discussions in the project team in the hub that works with the support of the nodes on the final version of the ESFRI proposal, concerns the question if COVID-19 increases the need for the FNH-RI. I think it does. The first thing that strikes me about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is a health crisis which has close links to the food system and which exposes the inherent weaknesses in it. It is a zoonosis which seems to have emerged as a result of the unprofessional and perhaps even illegal trade in exotic wild animals in Wuhan. But it is still a zoonosis, and although as far as the experts are concerned it has [...]

One infrastructure boosts European food and health research Food and health are inextricably related to each other. We all know that we need a healthy and varied diet. We also know that too much fat, sugar or salt is bad for our health. It is up to science to devise solutions for problems related to food and health: which factors, such as habits, lifestyle, preferences and taste, play a role in consumer food choice behaviour? How, for example, can ‘personalised nutrition‘ help the consumer avoid developing specific health complaints? How can we ensure that a healthy choice becomes the consumer’s habitual choice? And how should we anticipate climate change and economic fluctuations to provide assurances for food security? A research infrastructure for food, nutrition and health will help answer this question. As food and health issues are major issues, research in the Food & Health area [...]

European platform for nutrition and health a crucial tool for retail and food industry Most people living in Europe consume too much salt, fat and sugar. This is leading to an increase in the number of people suffering from diet-related illnesses, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. To curb this trend, European consumers must be encouraged to eat more healthily – and it must be made easy for them to make this choice. Companies that are active in the food industry play a key role here, as the onus is on them to develop products that are both tasty and healthy. Insight into consumer behaviour is essential for development healthy products Knowledge is at the heart of each successful healthy food product. This knowledge includes information on consumers’ food intake and how this affects their bodies, as well as information on consumer behaviour [...]

Closer collaboration between scientific disciplines leads to health benefits The key to a long and healthy life is a balanced and healthy diet. Thanks to biomedical research – scientific research in the field of medicine – we are now well aware what a healthy diet needs to include as part of a healthy lifestyle. If every consumer followed the guidance of the Netherlands Nutrition Centre (Voedingscentrum), our society as a whole would reap the considerable health benefits. But unfortunately, that is not the case. Poor cooperation between scientific disciplines Why is this? One of the main reasons is that various scientific disciplines are not collaborating enough. Behaviour experts know everything about what motivates consumer behaviour: what social context people eat in and what in their environment persuades them to buy certain products. Having precisely the right knowledge is crucial, if you want healthy choices made by [...]

Building with bits and bytes in search of the core offering of a digital research infrastructure The term ‘research infrastructure’ readily conjures up the image of large-scale research facilities that can be used by different studies. In other words: physical infrastructure for classical research. But we are now living in a digital era. Increasingly more research is being carried out with digital data. The emergence of big data, open data, and ever further-reaching progress in artificial intelligence facilitate the development of knowledge and insight without random samples and experiments. In a society that is becoming increasingly digitised, the growth in the number of digital data sets is explosive. Research is thus becoming more and more data-driven. However, the data sets originate from different sources and have diverse structures, variables and measurements. Innovation at both a technical and organisational level is needed in order to use these [...]

A common platform for policy research as a solution to the obesity crisis in Europe Europe is struggling with an obesity crisis. We have created a society in which consumers are surrounded on nearly all sides by sweet, salty, fatty and over-portioned temptations. While the opinion that consumers themselves should take responsibility for their own diet is valid to some extent, governments have been introducing policies that are fundamentally food-related, with regulations on fruit at school, changes to VAT rates and licences to establish a business. However, there is still more we can do to encourage consumers to eat healthily and sustainably, given the failure of the market to address these issues. To begin with, there has been a significant increase in the social costs of diet-related diseases. These are costs that we all bear. WHO estimates indicate that the costs of obesity are 2 to [...]