The Institute of Food Research is the only publicly funded research institute in the
UK that addresses the fundamental understanding, the fundamental science of food and health.
It asks fundamental questions such as how does the gap work, how does it interact with
food and how that relates to the process of ages and to disease processes.
At the moment in the United Kingdom most of the developed world and the public health
burden is enormous and increasing due to food related illness, diabetes, obesity and so
forth.
Institute are therefore for the longer term and the research undertaken has got a very
clear strategic view to address these problems in society.
I work on natural products which are aimed at providing the science to underpin the finer
day message in other words what we are trying to understand is why eating 5 portions of
fruit and vegetables gives the protective effects for various diseases they do so a
lot of the work is mechanistic and looking at how these compounds are digested and how
they break down and how they deliver the benefit.
An example of fundamental research which is benefited from long term investment by the
Government's funding for science at IFR is a development of a form of broccoli which
has got a very high content of the active ingredient in there which promotes health.
We are interested in food structure and how food structure changes and breaks down in
the gastro intestine tracked because this not only effects the release and availability
of nutrients but the food structure can also impact on microbiological populations in the
gut which also have health implications.
The gut is the inner tube of life.
It is absolute essential to preserve and maintain life.
It is important because it processes the food that we take in on a daily basis, it breaks
it down and makes it more accessible as an energy source for the body without the gut
we would essentially starve to death very quickly so one of the technologies we are
developing is bio imaging technology where we are hoping visualise in real time mirco
interactions with the gut epithelium and the gut immune system.
We also have here at the institute a model gut or model colon which is a continuous fermentation
system which allows us to culture the microbes which are present in the human colon and this
provides us with a means by which we can investigate and interrogate their function which is impractical
and ethically cannot be carried out in humans such an important technology that allows us
to be able to study the function of this vast collection of microbes which reside in the
human gastro-intestinal track.
A core part of IRF's research relates to working with food borne pathogens and how they grow
and how they grow practically on food not just on food as it grows food as its processed,
food as it is transported, food as it is stored in the supermarket shelves this has been analysed
and put on a big database so that manufacturers or academics or anyone interested can work
out what the best possible combination of processes is to insure the minimum risk of
contamination by food borne pathogens.
We also have an intensive programme on the main biological organisms: salmonella, campylobacter
and we a particular niche expertise in Clostrdium botulinum and we have a facility here that
can handle that organism and then we represent a national resource.
The Institute employs about 210 people it has an annual budget of just over £50M a
year and of that something like a million pounds a year comes from industrial sources,
the BBSRC which is our sponsoring institute provides a core grant of just under £10M
and the reminder comes from a wide variety of resources.
IFR works in partnership with a range of organisations and institutes we have good relationships
with the food industry, we have to be able to work in a multidisciplinary way with clinicians,
nutritionists, plant scientists, with agricultural scientists, regeneo specialists to move forward.