News and Progress
Researchers examine food choices to help prevent obesity
New collaboration at MU targets children and families
Oct. 29, 2009
Christopher Hardin, director of the MU Nutritional Center for Health, shows children how to choose nutritious foods. The nutritional center also will serve as the kitchen for the MU Child Development Lab at the College of Human Environmental Sciences. Photo by Nicholas Benner
The United States is in the throes of an obesity epidemic. According to the National Institutes of Health, about one in three adults is obese and one in five children is overweight. A new multidisciplinary center at the University of Missouri aims to help reverse the trend.
Researchers in the College of Human Environmental Sciences, School of Medicine, and College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources have established the MU Nutritional Center for Health. Mizzou will renovate facilities in Gwynn Hall for nutritional studies aimed at improving how Americans eat and to teach children and adults healthy eating and exercise habits.
Food choice behavior
Donna Medlin, BS HE ’77, pledged $5,000 to the center for Phase I of the construction — a teaching kitchen and observational food choice laboratory. “Nutrition is still such an emerging science,” says Medlin, food and nutrition services director at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Mo. “We really need to be able to translate food science into nutrition and to see its effect on people. The university has all the pieces to make it work.”
The restaurant-quality kitchen will be used to show children and their families how to prepare high-quality, healthy foods. The food choice lab will help researchers understand how children make food choices.
“You can teach people what and how to eat,” says Christopher Hardin, the center’s director. “But we’re all busy, and people ultimately have to make their own choices. The more we understand the underlying determinants of food choice behavior, the better we can deal with the things that influence food choice behavior.”
Nutritional studies
Hardin is actively raising funds for Phase II of the center: to construct a research metabolic kitchen. A metabolic kitchen prepares precise, nutrient-controlled meals for individuals participating in the center’s nutritional studies. During the course of a study, participants only eat food prepared in the kitchen and eat at the center for most meals, or pick up pre-packaged meals to take home.
“The metabolic kitchen will allow researchers to conduct prolonged human feeding trials,” Hardin says. “These trials will allow us to understand how food and agricultural practices affect human health and chronic disease. With controlled studies, researchers will be able to objectively evaluate the health benefits of specific food components, including new and novel foods produced by MU plant and animal scientists.”
To support the center or to learn more, contact Nancy Schultz, director of development, at 573-882-5142 or schultzn@missouri.edu.