Toward a healthy diet
Food and nutrition are two areas identified as strategic by UCL. Louvain4Nutrition is the Louvain4 platform that addresses them.
Louvain4Nutrition is a multidisciplinary research platform targeting food and nutrition. A growing team of UCL researchers, whose expertise covers many fields, address the crucial question: ‘What is a healthy diet?’ Louvain4Nutrition is part of the Louvain4 interdisciplinary research initiative, which aims to meet the great challenges of today and tomorrow.
Research areas
Louvain4Nutrition develops projects in:
- food production;
- impact of food components at the physiological, biological and biochemical levels;
- legal, behavioural and social aspects of nutrition and health.
Some of Louvain4Nutrition’s projects:
- Food4Gut: An interdisciplinary project that aims to show how consuming more sustainably grown vegetables rich in inulin (a dietary fibre fermented by intestinal bacteria) can contribute to a healthy diet and prevent obesity.
- Treating obesity with stilbene: This project, involving Vietnamese, Brazilian and Cameroonian partners, aims to evaluate the anti-adipogenic effects of piceatannol (a bioactive compound, called a stilbene, in the seeds of several exotic fruits) via intestinal absorption tests, in vivo and in vitro bioaccessibility and bioavailability evaluations, toxicological assessments and advanced chemical characterisations, all involving different experimental models.
- UCL Clinical Investigation Centre for Nutrition: Equipped with dedicated infrastructure for interdisciplinary research in nutrition and health, the centre specialises in the cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects of nutrition, bioactive compound bioaccessibility and bioavailability assessments, compound digestive biotransformation, and the study of the impact of food components on intestinal function.