URBANA, Ill. – Eating avocado as part of your daily diet can help improve gut health, a new study from University of Illinois shows. Avocados are a healthy food that is high in dietary fiber and monounsaturated fat. However, it was not clear how avocados impact the microbes in the gastrointestinal system or “gut.”

URBANA, Ill. – Carrots are a good source of beta-carotene, which is a precursor of vitamin A. But to get the full health benefits of this superfood, you need an active enzyme to produce this vitamin.

A new breakthrough by University of Illinois researchers, including John Erdman, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, will make it easier to detect, prevent, and treat nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The research team’s methods use noninvasive ultrasound, that could be used during a routine physical, to measure the amount of fat in the liver. The discovery could have a major impact on the prognoses of millions of people suffering from NAFLD around the world. Read more.

URBANA, Ill. — Scanning social media while listening to a lecture. Watching a favorite television series while studying. Today’s young people frequently juggle multiple streams of information and entertainment media while doing schoolwork, a trend that researchers call distracted learning.

URBANA, Ill. – As food makes its way through your digestive system, gut microbiota also get energy from the food. This creates a microbial footprint of what you’ve consumed. But the detective work to find these footprints includes wrangling huge sets of data.

After all, the human gut microbiota is a collection of trillions of bacteria that reside in the gut.

URBANA, Ill. – Chances are you’ve heard of or even taken probiotics: supplements delivering “good microbes” to the gut, providing a wide range of health benefits. If you’re really up on your gut health, you may also be aware of prebiotics: supplements designed to fuel the good microbes already living in our guts.

The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a catalyst for collaborative research projects across engineering and agriculture. With a strong record of team-building for large long-term interdisciplinary research and education projects at the University of Illinois, CDA continues to offer a competitive seed-funding program. The newly announced collaborative projects span two or more of the Center’s initial themes: automation, data, animals and crops, and people.

URBANA, Ill. ­–The Division of Nutritional Sciences graduate training program at the University of Illinois received a $150,000 Higher Education Challenge Grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to jumpstart development of courses as part of a proposed new certificate program focused on food/ feed regulations and nutrition policy. The new program will prepare graduate students for leadership positions in industry and government.

URBANA, Ill. — Compared with adults, children and adolescents are less sensitive to the sweet taste and need 40% more sucrose in a solution for them to detect the taste of sugar, a new study found. Read more from Illinois news Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. - Sharon Donovan, professor and Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Diet and Health at University of Illinois, will assume the role of director of the newly established Personalized Nutrition Initiative (PNI).

The PNI is a partnership between the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U of I.