Meanwhile, Prof Woodside and her team, along with colleagues at Harvard University and University College Dublin, will conduct a five-year intensive investigation into the use of ‘biomarkers’ in nutritional research, especially whether they can capture overall dietary intake and the quality of our diets, allowing researchers to better explore what the links are between diet and disease risk, specifically heart disease.
Biomarkers are measurable indicators of any biological state or process – and it has been proposed that biomarkers measured in, for example, urine, may be a better way of measuring dietary intake and quality than relying on traditional dietary assessment methods via questionnaires. The proposed research will explore this, and also explore whether knowing more about their diet quality measured using biomarkers makes people more likely to make changes to their diet.
Professor Ian Young, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Health NI and Director of HSC R&D, said: “Dietary intervention has the potential to reduce the incidence of many common diseases. Collaborations like these help to ensure that the best evidence is available to guide the advice which we provide for our population, and confirms that NI researchers are at the forefront of international work in nutrition research.”
Dr Neha Issar-Brown, Head of Population and Systems Medicine for UKRI’s Medical Research Council said: “This trans-Atlantic, interdisciplinary research has great potential for understanding how the mechanisms linking nutrition, health and disease act in combination – a major challenge in this field."
"Unhealthy diets are among the major modifiable risk factors for many diseases, especially non-communicable diseases and chronic conditions that are becoming increasingly common all over the world. Consequently, there is an urgent need for research that enables measuring, assessing, and potentially modifying, people's diets for greater public-health impact.”
To read more see the full QUB press release.