On April 6th, Professor John Van Camp from nutriFOODchem of Ghent University, Belgium, was invited to the College of Food Sciences & Technology, HZAU, giving a lecture titled “Functional foods within a healthy diet——Lessons learned from the past and future challenges”, which attracted a large number of teachers and students.
Starting with common health problems such as adolescent obesity, Prof. John Van Camp introduced to the audience the concept of functional foods, saying that functional foods can improve health and reduce the risk of having diseases. To define functional foods, he illustrated that first, it should meet the definition of foods, and second it must testify to the positive effects that it can have on balanced diet. Prof. John Van Camp also introduced a few main research fields concerning functional foods: the first is to determine certain nutrients and bioactive ingredients and focus on the studies of the bioavailability and biological activity of the components; the second is to analyze the risks and benefits of a specific nutrient ingredient; and the third is to research on the special properties of functional foods. Dietetics and writing dietary guide are also popular research areas abroad.
Apart from the research on the correlation between food nutrition and health, Prof. John Van Camp and his team put much effort in nutrition and health education and services. Aiming at the adolescent obesity caused by teenagers’ failure to follow experts’ health advice, the team proposed a series of solutions, including giving healthy diet interactive classes, holding regular healthy diet seminars among parents and urging campus food stores to sell healthy foods and pay due attention to food safety in the light of their survey of dietary intervention. To make teenagers accept and like healthy food, the research team has even developed a game based on psychological principles, in which teenagers can gain points and level up upon the recognition of the game system if they have uploaded their video of eating healthy food, thus they can be encouraged to develop healthy eating habits.
At the end of the lecture, both teachers and the participating students were discussing heatedly over the interesting topic. Many students came to realize that food nutrition research should go beyond bioactive ingredients and the development of relevant products. The research and practice of dietetic promotion are also of great importance.