URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) was awarded a $335,005 grant from the Agricultural Transformation Initiative (ATI) to address malnutrition in Malawi. SIL’s nutrition team is housed in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

URBANA, Ill. — A diet including daily avocado consumption improves the ability to focus attention in adults whose measurements of height and weight are categorized as overweight or obese, a new randomized control trial found. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted the 12-week study, published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Read more.

URBANA, Ill. — Being distracted by technology during mealtime may decrease the amount of food a person eats, nutrition scientists suggest in a new study.

When 119 young adults consumed a meal while playing a simple computer game for 15 minutes, they ate significantly less than when they ate the same meal without distractions, said lead author Carli A. Liguori.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose provide the seductive taste of sweetness without the calories contained in sugar – a seeming win-win for people who need to control their blood sugar and insulin levels or weight.

However, simply tasting or consuming sucralose may affect blood glucose and insulin levels on glucose tolerance tests, scientists at the University of Illinois found in a new study.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

As a result of intersecting research interests in women’s health, a new collaboration was forged between Zeynep Madak-Erdogan (GSP/ONC-PM), Assistant Professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Justina Zurauskiene (ONC-PM), Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement and Education (BRIDGE) fellow and fellow at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences in Birmingham, England.

URBANA, Ill. — A new study in rats suggests that caffeine may offset some of the negative effects of an obesogenic diet by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and limiting weight gain and the production of triglycerides. Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. — At least 90% of head and neck cancer patients develop symptoms that affect their ability or desire to eat, because of either the tumor itself or the surgery or radiation used to treat it. These problems, called nutrition impact symptoms, have wide-ranging negative effects on patients’ physical and mental health and quality of life.

The newly named director of the first ever Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), Haley Oliver, engaged her audience by asking a question everyone had to answer in the affirmative: “Have you ever had diarrhea?”

Usually an uncomfortable inconvenience for most of us in the developed world, foodborne illnesses such as Norovirus, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, and toxoplasmosis kill 420,000 people annually. Thus, Oliver’s work puts food safety at the core of food security.  

URBANA, Ill. – Many low-income countries have turned to mass food fortification programs to address nutrient deficiencies in their populations. But many of these programs lack the resources needed to determine if the appropriate amount of nutrients is consistently present in those food products.

A team of University of Illinois researchers has developed an affordable, reliable paper-based sensor that works with a cellphone app – also developed at U of I – to detect levels of iron in fortified food products.

URBANA, Ill. – When coffee beans are processed and roasted the husk and silverskin of the bean are removed and unused, and often are left behind in fields by coffee producers.

Food science and human nutrition researchers at the University of Illinois are interested in the potential of inflammation-fighting compounds found in the silverskin and husk of coffee beans, not only for their benefits in alleviating chronic disease, but also in adding value to would-be “waste” products from the coffee processing industry.