Nutrition for health and during illness
What should I eat to feel good? How does food affect the climate? What role do diet and nutrition play in the development and treatment of disease? The interest in food and health-related questions is significant, and the understanding of the relevance of nutrition for the human body is constantly growing.
Nutrition is of great importance both in promoting and maintaining health throughout life and for managing nutrition-related changes associated with disease. Our research groups work interdisciplinarily to increase and disseminate scientifically based knowledge about nutrition for health and disease, and for sustainable eating habits
Through leading research and education, we understand, explain, and improve nutrition for health and during illness.
Nutrition, Inflammation, and Cardiometabolic Health
We study how diet affects our cardiometabolic health, including blood lipids and inflammation, both in healthy individuals and those with underlying diseases. The purpose of this research is to better understand how we should eat to prevent lifestyle-related illnesses and improve metabolic health in chronic diseases.
Projects
Sustainable eating habits
How we produce and consume food accounts for a large part of man's impact on the climate and environment. Together with researchers at Research Institutes Sweden (RISE), we are researching the relationship between dietary intake and both climate footprint and impact on the environment, among adults and among young people in Sweden. We also link this information to later risk of cardiovascular disease and premature death.
Projects
Objective and Subjective Methods for Assessing Dietary Intake
For nutritional research, it is crucial to have tools for measuring dietary intake and investigating the relationship between diet and health. The department Klinisk nutrition at Sahlgrenska Academy has a long history of developing and using methods to objectively measure dietary intake and nutritional status.
Professor Björn Isaksson, the first professor at Klinisk nutrition, published a description in 1980 on how nitrogen in urine can be used to objectively measure protein intake, which has since become an accepted validation method. The department also developed methods to measure intake of substances like iron using stable isotopes and an ileostomy model to assess absorption and excretion of various nutrients. Since 1998, equipment has been in place to measure total energy expenditure using the method Dubbelmärkt vatten (DLW).
At our department, we currently use several subjective methods to assess dietary intake, such as frequency questionnaires and 24-hour recall reports. Additionally, we explore objective biomarkers, including plasma fatty acids and metabolite patterns in urine or plasma. The challenge lies in identifying specific biomarkers that directly correlate with consumption levels of different nutrients, foods, or dietary patterns. This motivates our involvement in nutritional metabolomics, aiming to identify metabolite patterns in serum and urine through Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and Liquid-chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analyses.
Projects
Early Life Cycle Nutrition
We study the associations between dietary intake, nutritional status, and health throughout life. Our studies contribute to our understanding of the importance of diet and lifestyle during pregnancy, breastfeeding, childhood, and adolescence for overall health.
Projects
Nutrition in Disease
This encompasses various projects that study different aspects of nutritional treatment and how dietary interventions can be used to prevent, treat, and influence outcomes of various diseases. Examples of this include allergy-related lung diseases and rheumatic conditions.
Projects
Close connection between research and education
There is close cooperation between the Institute’s research and our education and training, in which many of our researchers too are involved. They supervise doctoral students and teach on our regular programmes, freestanding courses and vocational care programmes within Sahlgrenska Academy.
