Crops, Food and Health WoGr

Crops, Food and Health - lead Cathie Martin

Next activities: White paper from the EPSO workshops on Plant Pigments and Human health (held May 2011)

Members:

Cathie Martin from the John Innes Centre, UK will lead this group to address one of the most important challenges for the next fifty years - to reduce the impact of chronic disease.

The worldwide spread of unhealthy eating practices is increasing alarmingly and experts warn of increased  mortality from associated chronic diseases.

Diets rich in plant-based foods are strongly associated with reducing these risks. However, as yet, the constituents in plants that promote health have proved difficult to identify with certainty, thereby making the precision of dietary recommendations uncertain.

Scientists want to contribute. It is essential for plant scientists to build multidisciplinary interactions with researchers in nutrition and chronic diseases pathology in order to contribute novel insight into which foods reduce the risk of chronic disease and how these foods work to impact human health and reduce some of the complexity of the diet-health relationship.

This was the focus of the EPSO workshop ‘Plant Pigments and Human Health’ on May 2011, which was highly appreciated by all participants and gave rise to this working group.

In particular, plant biochemistry can make significant contributions to the identification and measurement of many metabolites in plant-based foods, especially phytonutrients known to promote health.

From this, plant genetics and metabolic engineering can be used to make foods that differ only in their content of specific phytonutrients. Please contact Cathie Martin to join the group and for further information.