Welcome to the Humans of Nutrition Podcast brought to you by Registered Nutritionists Anna Wheeler and Prof Danielle McCarthy.

In this podcast Anna and Danielle are delighted to introduce Maria Traka, Head of Food and Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (NBRI) at Quadram Institute.

Danielle attended the Food & Nutrition NBRI Stakeholder Engagement Event earlier this year. A key part of this stakeholder meeting was to generate discussion on how the McCance and Widdowson’s series of Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID) is currently being used. Thanks to those who shared how this database informs their work - you can access our blog on the meeting here.

But we needed to hear more about the important work being conducted! As background, the Food & Nutrition NBRI was set up in 2023 and is a national coordinating ‘hub’ in nutrition and health and the leading national provider of new and continuously updated data tools and services vital for UK public health research and innovation.

Of course the Food and Nutrition NBRI did not start from scratch – it is part of the evolution that traces back to pioneers of nutrition research, namely Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson. Tune in to find out:

What has changed over the years?

Who uses food composition databases? For what?

How often are nutritional databases updated?

What needs to be considered to future proof nutritional databases to stay relevant?

How do consumers influence what information may need to be captured on a nutritional database? (Inside scoop - Maria shares plans to include plant-based products in the dataset, a perfect example of consumer influence and future-proofing)

As nutrition professionals, we know how challenging it is to make the complex simple. Maria faces this challenge daily. For example:

How do we represent the range of different types of fibres that have different physiological impacts?

How do we keep pace with food reformulations?

We discuss nutrient profiling – an easy, accessible, at-a-glance way of categorising food. But what is getting lost in translation? Where do bio-actives sit? Additives? Processing techniques? UPF’s? What about environmental scores?

The complexity of the work of NBRI is obvious and real – how does Maria deal with these professional challenges? It’s a combination of values, vision, teamwork and being a realist.

Maria ends with a plea to make data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. If you have influence in the food data space, and are invested in public health benefit, let’s make it FAIR!

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