Molecular Nutrition Research and Food Technology potx

Molecular Nutrition Research as a Basis for Disease Prevention and Health +++ The German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke – Our Research Focus +++ Health and Nutrition at t

Molecular Nutrition Research as a Basis for Disease Prevention and Health +++ The German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke – Our Research Focus +++ Health and Nutrition at the TU Berlin – the Center for Preventive Foods +++ The “Brandenburger Ernährungs- und Krebsstudie”: A Potsdam Contribution to the Euro-pean Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) +++ Nutrigenomics in Berlin-Brandenburg +++ BEN – the Food Network for the Capital Region +++ Nutrigenomics and Gene Regulation +++ Food Technology for New Markets from TU Berlin +++ ORGANOBALANCE – From Spin-Off to Successful Probiotics Producer

Issue 36 · January 2009

Molecular Nutrition Research and Food Technology

Impressum Publisher: BioTOP Berlin-Brandenburg

Fasanenstraße 85 · D-10623 Berlin Phone +49 30 318622-11 Fax +49 30 318622-22 biotop@biotop.de · www.biotop.de Editor: Thilo Spahl

Design & Production: supiran.de Translation: Textbüro Reul GmbH · Frankfurt Photos: page 3: dreamstime.com/Christophe Testi · page 11:

dreamstime.com/Milosluz · page 14/15: dreamstime.com/

Shaik Dawood/Titania1980/Jack Kunnen/Liga Lauzuma/

Janpietruszka/Dorlies Fabri/Missjelena/Evestock/Olga Langerova/Sergei Didyk/Elnur · page 19: BASF SE · others: authors or BioTOP

BioTOP is a joint initiative of the state of Berlin and the state of Brandenburg under the umbrella of the TSB Innovationsagentur Berlin GmbH.

BioTOP is funded by the federal state of Berlin, the federal state of Brandenburg and the Investitionsbank Berlin, cofunded by the European Union (European Fund for Regional Development) BioTOP coordinates the implementation of the master plan of the health region Berlin-Brandenburg in the field “Biomedicine/Biotechnology”

Molecular Nutrition Research as a Basis for Disease Prevention and Health 3 The German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke –

Health and Nutrition at the TU Berlin – the Center for Preventive Foods 6 The “Brandenburger Ernährungs- und Krebsstudie”:

A Potsdam Contribution to the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) 8 Nutrigenomics in Berlin-Brandenburg 10 BEN – the Food Network for the Capital Region 13 Nutrigenomics and Gene Regulation 14 Food Technology for New Markets from TU Berlin 16 ORGANOBALANCE – From Spin-Off to Successful Probiotics Producer 18

Molecular Nutrition Research as a Basis for

Disease Prevention and Health

A third of all health spending is accounted for by illnesses whose origin and progression are influenced directly or indirectly by dietary factors The molecular basis of diet-related illnesses is therefore a challenging area of research for which the bioregion Berlin- Brandenburg has strong credentials The close links that exist here between genome research, molecular and clinical nutrition research and plant biotechnology have supported the development of new strategies in recent years to diagnose, prevent and treat diet-related illnesses.

Dr Kai Bindseil

Director BioTOP Berlin-Brandenburg

Particularly in the field of nutrigenomics, which focuses on the interaction between diet or food components and the human genome, the region has produced many new ideas BioProfil Nutrigenomik, funded by the German Ministry

of Education and Research (BMBF), is a network

in which basic research and its application take place side by side and where research institutes and biotech companies have joined forces to develop new products, particularly for diagnostics

The area’s outstanding research facilities, like the German Institute of Human Nutrition, the Innovation Center Health and Nutrition (IGE)

of the Technische Universität Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, form the basis for this fruitful cooperation

Alongside advancements in biotechnology, many preventive measures are available today that can help considerably to reduce the inci-dence of many chronic illnesses For the field of preventive health to benefit as quickly as pos-sible from new scientific findings, the master plan

of the health cluster Berlin-Brandenburg has made “Prevention, Health Promotion, Rehabili-tation and Diet” an independent field of activi ty that cooperates closely with the field “Biotech-nology and Biomedicine” Here the goal is to make Berlin-Brandenburg into a science-led model region for nutrition, health and food

In this issue of BioTOPics some of the most

im portant nutrition researchers in Berlin-Bran-denburg report on research projects and product developments

The German Institute of Human Nutrition

Potsdam-Rehbrücke – Our Research Focus

The German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke (DIfE) investigates the ori-gins of nutrition-associated diseases with the aim of developing new preventive strate-gies, treatments and dietary recommendations The scientists engaged in interdisciplinary research at the institute use a broad spectrum of scientific, medical and epidemiological research methods The institute’s research is currently focussed on the most important diseases that are associated with dietary factors: obesity, diabetes and cancer.

Research Focus Metabolic Syndrome and Type-2 Diabetes

Metabolic syndrome is the term used to describe a complex of

symptoms that include overweight, high blood pressure, insulin

resistance and disorders of the lipid metabolism The syndrome

has a genetic basis but is usually only triggered by the positive

energy balance (high calorie intake and little exercise) that occurs

frequently in countries with a “western lifestyle” Incidence as

well as severity of this syndrome and its main secondary

compli-cation, type-2 diabetes, have increased dramatically in all

west-ern countries This trend can also be observed in the Potsdam

EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and

Nutri-tion) study conducted at the DIfE (Figure 1)

Type-2 diabetes is one of the most common and cost intensive

chronic diseases today According to the assessment of the CoDiM

(Costs of Diabetes Mellitus) study, the direct costs of diabetes in

Germany were 30.6 billion euros or 14.2 percent of total

spend-ing in the health care system in 2001 Given that the prevalence

of diabetes is expected to rise by almost 50 percent between 2000

and 2030, a huge increase in costs must be expected In

addi-tion, despite treatment, the secondary complications of

metabol-ic syndrome shorten life expectancy by approximately eight years

We can therefore expect a fall in average life expectancy and an

explosion in expenses unless we manage to reverse or at least to

slow down this trend To do so, we need fundamental insights

into the causes of metabolic syndrome and effective strategies for

the prevention and treatment of obesity and diabetes

Using data from the Potsdam EPIC study, the DIfE has therefore

developed a diabetes risk test which is already being used by

health insurance funds At the same time, DIfE scientists have

made important advances in determining the genetic origins

of the metabolic syndrome In a mouse model (Figure 2), they

identified a natural mutation in the Tbc1d1 gene which affects

the regulation of the energy metabolism in the muscles Due

to this mutation, the mice lack a particular metabolic enzyme that enables them to remain slim even when fed a high-fat diet, and also protects them against diabetes In the course of their research, the scientists gained profound insight into the function

of the gene This provides the basis for developing new therapy and prevention strategies

In addition, DIfE scientists are using epidemiological and clinical studies to investigate the interactions between diet, genes and diabetes In the context of the Potsdam EPIC Study, they recently succeeded in showing that a variation of the TCF7L2 gene can determine whether a person can reduce the risk of developing diabetes by eating wholegrain products

Prof Dr Hans-Georg Joost Scientific Director · German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke (DIfE)

Figure 1

Tromso

Umea

Aarhus Oxford

Cambridge

Utrecht

Malmo Copenhagen Potsdam Heidelberg

TurinMilan Florence Naples Ragusa

Athens

Paris Lyon Oviedo

San Sebastian

Barcelona Pamplona

Centres of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)

They also found a link between a high-fat diet, genetic variations

of a liver protein that binds fatty acids (FABP) and the human

sugar metabolism

Research at the institute also focuses on the biological

mecha-nisms that may be responsible for dietary preferences In large

sectors of society, people know what constitutes a healthy diet

Yet, paradoxically, this knowledge has had little effect on their

eating habits Many people still prefer to eat high-calorie food

that is less satiable and promotes the development of obesity

and type-2 diabetes To determine the role that gustation plays

in this phenomenon, scientists at the DIfE are investigating the

molecular mechanisms responsible for taste perception They

have already succeeded in finding different receptor variants

associated with different taste perceptions

Links between Diet and Cancer

Many epidemiological data confirm the assumption that diet

plays a major role in the development of cancer The DIfE has

con-tributed to this insight with its participation in the multi-centre

Europe-wide EPIC study The findings of this study show that a

low consumption of fibers and a high consumption of red meat

is associated with a higher incidence of colorectal cancer DIfE

also investigated the effect of fruit and vegetable consumption on

different types of cancer and found indications of a reduced risk

for cancer of the lung and of the oropharyngeal epithelium The

study also indicated that overweight is an important risk factor

for colon cancer (men and women) and for cancer of the kidney

and breast (women)

However, epidemiological studies do not unequivocally prove causal connections between diet and cancer This is why the DIfE

is also using biochemical, molecular and microbiological meth-ods as well as cellular testing systems and animal models to establish causality of the associations between cancer and diet

Preliminary findings support the assumption that the metabolic conversion of foreign substances absorbed with food may play

a role in the development of cancer Metabolism of xenobiot-ics can inactivate carcinogenic substances, but can also activate them Here, the genetically determined variants of the enzymes involved in the so-called “detoxification metabolism” play a decisive role Researchers at the institute were able to show that the bacteria in normal intestinal flora (Figure 3) can convert for-eign substances into toxic, mutagenic or possibly carcinogenic substances One example is the transformation of arbutin into the mutagenic substance hydrochinone, which triggered cancer

in animal experiments High concentrations of arbutin are found

in pear skins and in wheat Researchers at the DIfE are also study-ing the influence of micronutrients like selenium on the develop-ment of colon cancer and have already succeeded in identifying a selenium protein (an enzyme) produced by the body itself which

is synthesized more intensively in human colon tumors and can

be induced by components of cruciferous plants

However, more research is required to show the significance of these processes for the development or prevention of cancer The scientists at the institute have therefore developed “humanized” animal models which they will use to study the relationship between nutrition, inflammatory processes and the development

of colon cancer in vivo

Figure 2

The New Zealand obese mouse gains weight rapidly under a high-fat diet and

develops obesity, whereby the proportion of body fat can increase to over 40

percent (left) Despite a very high fat diet, the mice of the Swiss Jim Lambert

strain did not gain weight but stayed lean, due to their genetic makeup

(right).

Figure 3

Fluorescence marked intestinal bacteria Intestinal bacteria can transform nutritional components into toxic substances, which may play a role in carcinogenesis.

The concentration of scientists in agricultural, food and nutritional research in Berlin-Bran-denburg is among the highest in Europe The leading institutions in this field are the three universities of Berlin, the University of Potsdam, the institutes of the Max Planck, Fraunhofer and Leibniz societies and the universities of applied sciences in Berlin and Brandenburg The food industry, which plays an important role in the economy of the Berlin-Brandenburg region, is also an important actor in this field

The Aims of the Center

One aim of the Center for Preventive Foods is

to bring together existing resources along the entire added value chain and develop networks between them This is both desirable and nec-essary, because demand for interdisciplinary cooperation in both national and international projects is growing steadily Linking up the com-petences of relevant regional research institu-tions and industrial companies will produce synergy effects, which in turn allow us to press

ahead with the development

of functional foods with a pre-ventive effect

A further goal of the CPF is to provide new dynamism for industry by innovations in the food and nutrition sci-ences and enhance knowledge transfer in the functional food sector by purposefully net-working science and industry The CPF mission is to conduct research into food components, starting with agricultural pro-duction and looking at the whole value-added chain all the way to the consumer In doing so, we hope to provide scientific evidence of their health-promoting effects and

to produce targeted preventive foodstuffs

Our research aims to identify food components with preven-tive effects and analyze com-pounds along the value added

Health and Nutrition at the TU Berlin –

the Center for Preventive Foods

The Center for Preventive Foods (CPF), founded in 2007 by the Technical University of Berlin, brings together important actors from nutrition-relevant sectors of the research environ-ment in Berlin-Brandenburg It combines R&D activities in the field of preventive foods and will intensify interdisciplinary cooperation between biotechnology, food chemistry and technology, nutrition science, biology and medicine.

Dr Edeltraud Mast-Gerlach

Center for Preventive Foods

mast-gerlach@lb.tu-berlin.de

Figure 1

VLB TFH HU OB TU FU BioTOP WVEB BAM BfR

FH Lausitz

IGZ IGV

DIfE

UP MPI Golm Fraunhofer IAP

ATB BEN

The research network of the Center for Preventive Foods – Research institutes, companies and associations participating in the CPF

Research

u BfR – Federal Institute for Risk Assessment

u ATB – Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Engineering in Bornim

u DIfE - German Institute of Human Nutrition in Nuthetal

u IGZ – Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops in Großbeeren

uFraunhofer IAP – Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research in Golm

u BAM – Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin

Industry

u IGV- Institut für Getreideverarbeitung GmbH in Nuthetal

uOB – Organobalance GmbH in Berlin

NGOs

u BioTOP uWVEB – Association of the Food Industry in Berlin and Brandenburg

u BEN – Brandenburg Food Network

chain, from biosynthesis to processing, and ultimately to

con-sumption “Our great strength is that we can study the entire food

chain from production to the consumer”, says the spokesman of

the Center, Prof Dr Dietrich Knorr “Our focus is on functional

food components of plant or microbial origin with a

health-pro-moting effect We are interested, for example, in sweet proteins

as non-calorific sweeteners as well as flavonoids and other

sec-ondary plant metabolites, trace elements and polyunsaturated

fatty acids What is always important for foods with functional

components are sound scientific data and that the nutrition

character of the products is preserved”

The use of foods that show additional health benefits must always

be accompanied by a public information campaign about a

bal-anced diet to ensure that foods with additional health benefits

supplement the regular diet in a sensible way

New Requirements for Food

Dietary awareness and the eating habits of the population have

changed considerably in recent years In the past it was

impor-tant to eat enough protein, essential fatty acids and vitamins,

whereas now the emphasis is on healthy nutrition Secondary

food components like flavonoids or polyphenols are increasingly

becoming valuable elements of our diet These bioactive

com-pounds can have a preventive effect and lower the risk of

devel-oping certain diseases like cancer or cardio-vascular disease The

molecular mechanisms underlying this effect are still unknown,

however Often it is not the original substance but metabolites

produced either by the organism itself or by intestinal bacteria

that have positive properties In our research, we aim to identify

these metabolites as well as the original substances and test them

to discover their properties The CPF has various model systems,

ranging from animal models, cell cultures and reporter gene

con-structs to the spectroscopic methods used to demonstrate

cancer-preventing effects on the skin The studies are intended to show,

for example, whether endogenous protective mechanisms can be

induced or strengthened The idea would then be to find

comple-mentary combinations of food components and possibly preserve

and refine them by cultivation and processing We intend to focus

on redox systems as well as probiotics and prebiotics and develop

an integrated matrix of coordinated projects for gentle and con-sumer-friendly processing The CPF will implement all steps, from optimizing the formation of the substances in plants, micro-organisms and/or plant cell cultures to raising the level of the food components in foodstuffs during processing, identifying the presence of food components in the organism and demonstrating their bioavailability and biological effects We intend to focus on plant products and look at the entire chain from cultivation to harvest, and from processing to food intake and biological effect Ultimately the medical, nutritional and biotechnological knowl-edge so obtained will provide the know-how for the industrial production of preventive foodstuffs and for the manufacture of health-promoting products

Together with the Center for Innovative Health Technologies ZiG, the Center for Preventive Foods will work in the pioneering field of

TU Berlin: “Health and Nutrition” The committees of the TU Berlin recently approved the launch of the Innovation Centre Health and Nutrition In these pioneering fields of technology and innova-tion, we will search for long-term solutions to important social needs and global problems

Figure 2: The interdisciplinary research concept of the CPF – Research along the value added chain

Food processing and analytics

Food component extraction · Post-harvest technology · Processing

Bioactivity studies and molecular mechanisms

Bioavailability · Health benefits/prevention · Toxicology

Functional foods Communication

Target substances

Production systems

Root cell cultures · Cell and tissue cultures · Plants and algae · Microorganisms

Figure 3

Innovation Center Health and Nutrition

Health Technologies

ZiG

Communication Monitoring Health sector

Nutrition and Preventive Foods

Teaching and Training Knowledge and Technology Transfer

These initial foundations later evolved to become an Institute of the Academy of Sciences, and the research into nutrition conducted in Rehbrücke during this period not only had an impact on research in this field in the countries

of the Warsaw Pact but also on nutrition research

in West Germany As a student at the University

of Giessen in West Germany, I often heard lec-turers referring to the research being conducted

at this Institute and express the wish for the dif-ferent nutrition research centres in Germany to cooperate more closely

When the German Institute of Human Nutrition was founded as a Leibniz Institute in Potsdam-Rehbrücke following German reunification, nutrition research was put on a new scientific and financial basis The founding members con-sidered it particularly important to orient the Institute more strongly towards research into human nutrition and to translate basic research findings into dietary habits of the population

on sound scientific grounds Epidemiology was assigned such a function alongside with clini-cal research Epidemiology therefore initially became a working group and in 1996 a depart-ment at the DIfE

Epidemiology is a relatively new research disci-pline in Germany One of its tasks is to discover ways of lowering the risk of disease by vation and targeted intervention The obser-vational approach requires large groups of the population as participants and active coopera-tion from many people to draw long-term con-clusions about how to prevent chronic diseases

For the DIfE, dietary and diet-related factors like obesity are of prime concern The launch

of a major observational study was discussed

intensively in various European working groups during the 1990s Under the coordination of the International Cancer Research Agency in Lyon, they formed a consortium, which initially included the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg as the German partner The founding

of the German Institute of Human Nutrition and the establishment of the working group “Medi-cal Epidemiology” there offered an opportunity

to apply the approaches being discussed at the European level in Brandenburg too At that time, the consortium took a certain amount of con-vincing to persuade it that Potsdam was a suit-able study centre, because all the other 22 cen-tres of the EPIC consortium came from regions that had been part of the West during the Cold War (Figure 1, Page 4)

The Brandenburg component of the European long-term EPIC study was launched in 1994 with funding from the German Federal Minis-try of Research and Technology Some 120,000 inhabitants of Brandenburg received letters ask-ing them to take part in the study and more than 27,500 of them agreed All participants were asked to fill out questionnaires at home and then invited to come to a study centre at the Health Authority of the City of Potsdam, where further interviews were conducted, the participants’ blood pressure was measured, and anthropometric measurements were taken together with a blood sample This collection

of data and biological materials forms the basis for assessing the risks of developing a range of chronic diseases

The “Brandenburger Ernährungs- und

Krebsstudie”: A Potsdam Contribution to the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)

The long tradition of nutrition research in Brandenburg began when the Russian military administration decided on 10 June 1946 to move the Institute for Nutrition and Food Science from Dahlem to Potsdam-Rehbrücke It was joined in 1948 by the Institute for Vitamin Testing and Vitamin Research from Leipzig.

Prof Dr Heiner Boeing

German Institute of Human Nutrition

Potsdam-Rehbrücke Department of Epidemiology

boeing@dife.de

To evaluate the relationships between the risk of disease and

diet and other life-style factors, it is necessary to record

medi-cal events in the cohorts for the disease end points

comprehen-sively and accurately over a number of years that are of interest to

researchers To do so, all participants in the study are contacted

by questionnaire every two to three years and asked to report on

their new diseases In this mailed questionnaires, participants

with a new disease are asked to provide information about the

treating physician, whom we then contact to obtain a medical

diagnosis according to the international classification of

diseas-es according to the World Health Organization A key factor in

the scientific quality of a long-term study is the percentage of

returned questionnaires Due to the strong commitment of all

study participants, our response rate is high compared to other

studies world-wide, with a return rate for each of the

question-naires (with one exception) of more than 95 %

The extensive collection of data on dietary and lifestyle factors

gathered at the beginning of the study will be supplemented

by further information enquired during the course of the study

Together with the information on participants’ diseases, it forms

the basis for the assessment of risk for the various chronic

diseas-es These risk analyses are conducted both for the EPIC Potsdam

population and jointly with other European study centres Overall,

the EPIC consortium has been very successful in recruiting study

participants and now has data on more than 520,000 study

par-ticipants The study is therefore one of the largest worldwide

and a leader in the assessment of risk relationships in Europe

The focus on diet in this study is of considerable scientific

impor-tance for the Department of Epidemiology, since diet is one of

the institute’s main research themes Potsdam’s contribution to

the EPIC consortium therefore includes methodology for recording

dietary data, evaluating dietary patterns and investigating the

role of dietary factors for predicting various diseases A further

focus is on anthropometric parameters and indices, including the

distribution of body fat The endpoints of interests are type-2

diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases and cancer

Obesity has an important role to play in this research, for it is both conditioned by diet and also has major consequences for the body’s metabolism Following this sequence of relationships from diet to adipositas and further to risk of disease is a further research focus of the Department of Epidemiology

With its large cohort size, the EPIC consortium is one of the most active research groups with more than 500 publications up to now We estimate that around 200 scientists currently work with the EPIC data, including the roughly ten researchers at the Department of Epidemiology at the DIfE The EPIC research themes are not always of direct interest to the study participants; rather, EPIC research sometimes addresses very specific research ques-tions However, also their findings will be used in the long-term

to prevent disease

From the findings of this and other available studies we are beginning to identify a set of dietary and lifestyle factors that can lead to a considerable reduction of disease risk This includes

a diet with a strong component of wholemeal cereal products and high consumption of fruit and vegetables, in combination with stable body weight – around 25 BMI – over the course of

a lifetime and a minimum level of physical exercise Another important factor, of course, is not to smoke In our study we were able to show that subjects with a lifestyle of this kind had only a quarter the risk of developing diseases as those with all risk fac-tors (Figure 2)

In this way, the study participants from Brandenburg have helped establish further milestones in determining how we should shape our lifestyles to avoid the occurrence of chronic diseases in youth and middle-age and reduce the risk of mortality

Figure 2

Preventive Factors

1,2

1,0

0,8

0,6

0,4

0,2

0

Reducing the combined risk of type-2 diabetes, heart attack, stroke and cancer in the EPIC-Potsdam Study in connection with the presence of preventive factors

(no smoking, no adipositas, a healthy diet and sufficient exercise)

The many steps involved, from food ingestion and chewing, to its breakdown into

small-er units during digestion in the intestines, its absorption by the body and transportation to the cells, require many special functions of indi-vidual organs, which then provide the energy to different functions of the organism – as in the heart, brain, muscles or sensory organs

All these processes are carried out by proteins, whose structure and function are defined in the genome and which every human being

possess-es in a large number of variations, which differ only minimally from those of others These tiny differences are what makes every individual dif-ferent and determine his or her individual food-processing profile

Nutrigenomics is devoted to trying to under-stand these differences and includes two main fields of research:

One field concerns differences in the genetic blueprints, which ultimately produce different metabolic functions and hence variations in the risk of developing certain diseases The other field describes the direct reaction of the metab-olism to the intake of food, through changes in gene expression in various organs To give an example: eating potatoes – i.e., carbohydrates – causes the organism to react immediately, programming the organ systems involved to be ready for future intake of food and thus ensuring that they remain in a fit state for that activity

The study of these nutrigenomic processes has produced the first advances in recent years

Which strategy can be used to find out to deter-mine the genetic differences which are impor-tant to the metabolism? First of all, we need

a sufficient number of people willing to be examined more closely and who will consent to researchers studying their genetic profile A col-lective of this kind, which now comprises 2,600 participants, was established in our Department

of Clinical Nutrition at the German Institute for Human Nutrition under the auspices of a BMBF project entitled MESY-BEPO – Metabolisches Syn-drom Berlin Potsdam In a first step, we char-acterised the metabolism of the study subjects, looking at their blood fat values and at the vari-ous blood enzymes in the liver, intestines, fat tissue, muscles and other organs We then asked the participants to undergo a glucose tolerance test Here the test subjects drink 75 grams of sugar, and researchers then study the reaction

of the metabolism over a period of three hours, measuring both the rise in the blood sugar level and the hormonal responses to the sugar This test provides a lot of information about the metabolism We also characterised the test sub-jects with regard to the presence of many genes

in their metabolism

A first example concerns how eating a healthy diet affects the metabolism It is necessary first

of all to find out how quickly the metabolism reacts to food intake For these tests we used pairs of twins and asked one of them to eat a healthy diet and the other an unhealthy diet for

a period of four weeks During this time we char-acterised their metabolism It was found that, even after just four weeks, the sugar metabolism

of the twin eating a healthy diet had improved significantly – the rise in the blood sugar level after drinking 75 grams of sugar was lower and required considerably less insulin to absorb the sugar into the metabolism In other words, the twins eating a healthy diet had high insulin

Nutrigenomics in Berlin-Brandenburg

The metabolism is the basis for all life because it provides the energy for the biologi-cal processes in the body This involves a complex network of biologibiologi-cal reactions which facilitate the conversion of the energy gained from food into metabolic energy and at the same provide the components for constructing and maintaining the organism Metabolic pathways are like a transport network within a cell, which must manage many diverse functions ranging from the intake and utilisation of food to getting rid of waste.

Prof Dr Andreas F.H Pfeiffer

German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke and

Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin