Food Composition Databases – how are they evolving? With Maria Traka
Here’s what to expect…
Anna and Danielle chat to Maria Traka, Head of Food and Nutrition National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (NBRI) at Quadram Institute.
Formed in 2023, but standing on the shoulders of giants, the Food and Nutrition NBRI 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.
(If you haven’t yet had a chance to read our blog about how the McCance and Widdowson compositional dataset is being used and the need to protect it, you can catch up here.)
Food compositional datasets can’t and haven’t stood still. Maria brings to life:
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?
How do we represent the range of, for example, different types of fibres that have different physiological impacts?
How do we keep deal with food reformulations?
What about bio-actives? Additives? Processing techniques? UPF’s?
Should we be considering environmental scores?
So many questions! Data – love it or hate it, it forms the backbone of the work of nutrition professionals, and we, like the data, need to keep pace.
A ‘must listen’ for everyone with influence in the food data space, and those invested in public health benefit!
Happy listening!
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