Health Effects
HEALTH EFFECTS area in the Nutritech research programme focuses on establishing the physiological effects induced by foods and diets, and on finding food factors relevant for health maintenance and reducing risks of chronic diseases. Our key targets are obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and other aging-related diseases, such as Alzheimer disease.
Why Health Effects?
Public health is a both a key issue of our societies and a major driver in food business. While food technologies offer multiple possibilities for development of new foods and ingredients, we need to understand how foods influence our metabolism, and substantiate both health effects and safety. The expanding knowledge about genetic origin and pathogenesis of chronic diseases can be used for development of preventive measures also in terms of functional foods and ingredients.
What do we offer to Industrial Platform members?
We offer experise in substantiating nutritional and health claims of foods and diets, and for screening of functional ingredients. We search for new targets to serve as early biomarkers of disease pathogenesis, and help in identification of new dietary means in reduction the risk of chronic diseases. We also offer tools to evaluate the cost effectiveness of healthy foods and diets.
THE RESEARCH IS FOCUSED ON THE FOLLOWING AREAS:
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VTT has an analytical platform for evaluation the health effects of foods and ingredients. The analytical platform includes in vitro and in vivo assays to predict and determine the physiological responses of food products. VTT also offers its customers an analysis of the satiating properties of food products.
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VTT offers services for companies, when there is an interest in knowing how the products behave in the digestive tract. These services include identification of the food-specific metabolome by using a colon model and connecting this data to corresponding characterization of plasma and urine, and furthermore an assessment of diet-related compositional changes in colonic microbiota from human interventions.
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VTT is relying on metabolomics techniques to characterize the metabolome, combined with systems biology strategies to investigate, e.g., how changes in gene expression, gut microbial composition or immune/inflammatory status alter the metabolic phenotypes. Current biomedical interests include metabolic and autoimmune diseases. The emergence of systems biology and medicine is opening new opportunities to characterize and understand biological systems as well as to identify novel biomarkers and therapeutic avenues to benefit human health.
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VTT scientists use metabolomics and systems biology to study how are the genetic and environmental factors imprinted in the metabolome in the context of obesity, metabolic syndrome and related complications. The mechanisms are investigated by which alterations of metabolome lead to (patho)physiological changes at the systems level, with the final aim of discovery and functional characterization of metabolic markers and related mechanisms.
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Check also our another innovation programme: Technologies for Health
For more information please contact:
Academy prof. Kaisa Poutanen,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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