Research in the Department

The mission of the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics (DND) is to conduct high quality, internationally recognized, basic and clinical research on nutrition, lifestyle, metabolism and the risk of diseases during the life cycle, with the aim of developing new and improved strategies for clinical practice, disease prevention and public health. The research directions of the DND are dictated by its institutional role, which is to promote health, maintain health and treat disease through nutrition. In particular, the objectives of the research carried out within the structures of the DND are:

– Understand how diet and other lifestyle parameters, individually or in combination or through interactions with genetic and epigenetic factors, can influence growth, development, ageing, and metabolism at the cellular, tissue and whole-body level.
– To elucidate the role of nutrition and exercise in the physiology and pathophysiology of energy metabolism and the stress system.
– To investigate the influence of dietary habits (at the level of nutrients, food/food groups and dietary patterns) and physical activity habits on inflammatory processes and oxidative stress.
– Investigate the impact of diet and other lifestyle parameters on body composition and physical performance in health and disease. To ascertain the role of lifestyle patterns, body composition and metabolic dysfunction in determining the risk of obesity and its associated chronic diseases (e.g. DM2, cardiovascular, cancer).

– Design and implement nutrition/lifestyle interventions for the prevention and treatment of obesity and chronic non-communicable diseases.
– To improve the scientific base needed to translate knowledge into public health, disease prevention and clinical practice.
– To study the intestinal microflora (as an important factor in fat distribution, insulin sensitivity and glucose and lipid metabolism).
– Design innovative and functional foods and conduct quality assessment studies and studies on the genetic basis of food choices/preferences.

DND is characterised by innovative, high quality, internationally recognised research work and a network of collaboration with more than 160 universities and research centres around the world. During their tenure at DND, academic staff members have published over 1,780 scientific articles (> 80 articles per staff member) which have been cited more than 49,400 times (> 2,240 citations per staff member) according to the Scopus database (December 2017). The DND published research also refers to all National Documentation Center publications from 1993 to 2016, which is the most recent. In these publications, an important criterion for assessing the impact of scientific publications is their ranking among the most cited publications in the world, published in the same year and in the same field.