Congratulations to Dr van der Heijden who recently completed his PhD on ‘Alternative dietary protein to support skeletal muscle remodelling across the lifespan’ at the University of Exeter. He’s passionate about nutrition, health and sustainability having been involved in many research projects and is eager to secure a healthy and maintainable food future to help the pressing issue of global food security. We wish him all the best in his future career!

Read his publication on ‘Alternative dietary protein sources to support healthy and active skeletal muscle ageing’ here.

Our Nutrition Team recently attended the Nutrition Society Congress in Belfast and have a few takeaways and highlights to share from the array of interesting presentations and discussions throughout the week:

Key Takeaways

• Data plays an imperative role in supporting public health improvement, by feeding into all steps of the food system from farm to retail.
• Despite the congress theme being ‘New data – focused approaches and challenges’, all data matter and can tell us something, whether big or small, old or new.
• Global food system transformation requires cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary, and cross-country collaboration and co-operation.

Highlights

• Having the opportunity to share the work we have been doing with our Sensory Panel, developing a nutrition policy for panel tasting, in the Workplace Diet and Health Special Interest Group (SIG) Symposium.
• Sharing our survey findings conducted with MyNutriWeb on healthcare professional’s views on the need to update the protein visual and description within the Eatwell Guide to support protein diversification.
• Watching a fantastic array of oral and poster presentations, including Veronica Moran (our past industrial placement student) presenting her final year UG project work on dietitians’ involvement, confidence and perceptions around processed foods and health. Congratulations also to Veronica on graduating from the University of Leeds with a First-Class Honours degree in Food Science and Nutrition.
• Catching up with our friends and collaborators, and making new connections, seeing the beauty of Belfast and enjoying the Congress Dinner at the Titanic Belfast.