Food Digestion and Health
Become an expert in understanding the interactions between the gastro-intestinal tract, the gut microbiota and the food matrix
Do the digestive tract, the breakdown of foods and the human microbiome spark your interest? Would you like to learn more about how our digestion and absorption of nutrients is affected by the relations between the nutritional and physical make-up of foods? Do you feel attracted to the development of foods that have beneficial effects on human health? Then the specialisation ‘Food Digestion and Health’ might be a good choice for you.
In this specialisation, you will follow the courses Nutritional Physiology and Design and Interpretation of Nutrition Intervention studies and you can choose courses like Food Digestion: Fermentation in the Gut, and Food Digestion: Nutrient Breakdown & Absorption. Additionally, you choose Food Technology courses like Food Ingredient Functionality, Food Fermentation or Predicting Food Quality, and Nutrition courses like Nutrition and the Ageing Body and Molecular Regulation of Health & Disease.
This specialisation has a strong link with the Food Technology programme.
During your MSc thesis, you can focus on one topic in more depth via one of the chair groups. In this specialisation, you can choose from the following options:
- Food Chemistry
- Food Process Engineering
- Food Quality and Design
- Human and Animal Physiology
- Host-Microbe Interactomics
- Nutrition, Metabolism & Genomics
- Sensory Science and Eating Behaviour
- Nutrition and Disease
- Global Nutrition
- Nutritional Biology
Thesis examples
Within the specialisation ‘Food Digestion and Health’, some possible thesis options are:
- Starch digestibility in plant-based cheese (Food Quality and Design)
- The impact of food processing and the food matrix on the gastro-intestinal digestion of allergens (Food Quality and Design)
- Associations between menstruation and menopause and colorectal cancer treatment outcomes (Nutrition and Disease)
- Changes in dietary fibre intake and the relation with inflammation markers, the microbiota and cognitive performance (Nutrition and Disease)
- Gut-brain axis, prebiotics and cognitive decline (Nutritional Biology)
- The Metabolic Impact of Future Food Processing (Sensory Science and Eating Behaviour)
- Studying how solid food products are digested in the stomach to design healthier products (Food Process Engineering)