- Department
- Email Address
- [email protected]
- Research Areas
- Research Keywords
- Research Description
My expertise lies in interdisciplinary food and nutrition research, with particular emphasis on dietary lipids. I also lead human nutrition studies on diverse topics as Director of the Human Nutraceutical Research Unit which is a research and educational unit dedicated to advancing evidence-based functional foods and natural health products through collaborative partnerships.
- Research Summary
The role of physical properties in determining the metabolic and health effects of foods is often overlooked. We aim to better understand the relationships between food properties and metabolic response, particularly for dietary lipids. After chemical and structural analyses, real and model food systems are exposed to simulated gastrointestinal conditions using static and dynamic models. This generates insight into how food properties interact with the biochemical and biophysical aspects of digestion to determine nutrient release and absorption. We couple these experimental approaches with human clinical trials to relate material properties and their digestive behavior with metabolic endpoints (e.g. absorption, satiety, inflammation, lipemia, gastrointestinal symptoms).
- Techniques Used
- Encapsulation by emulsification to create model structures
- Emulsion and particle characterization by laser diffraction, melting behavior by differential scanning calorimetry, polymorphism by x-ray diffraction
- Microscopy (light, cryo-TEM, and confocal)
- Rheology (small and large deformations)
- Static & dynamic in vitro digestion models
- Randomized human controlled trials
- Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays- Lab Equipment
- Microfluidizer (M110-EH)
- Zetasizer
- Ultracentrifuge
- Reverse-phase HPLC with diode array detector
- Fluorescence microscope
- -80°C freezer
- Spectrophotometer- Links