Our objectives

Recently, there has been an amazing rise of research studies demonstrating the beneficial effects of plant foods and food phytochemicals to prevent metabolic disorders and associated cardiometabolic diseases. However, the findings are difficult to interpret and to integrate because of several levels of complexity, which are the high diversity of phytochemicals and their food sources, their extensive metabolism with some inter-individual variation, and their multi-target biological effects.

The ambition of the FOODPHYT project is to raise awareness and better understanding of the enormous potential of food phytochemicals to support the global fight against obesity and associated cardiometabolic diseases.

To achieve this goal, our main objectives are:

1- To critically review the existing knowledge on the metabolism, health effects, and mechanisms of action of the major food phytochemicals and make the information available to all in the open-access database PhytoHub

2-To improve the accuracy of dietary assessment for food phytochemicals, through the development of new metabolomics methods based on quantification of biomarkers of plant food intake, and comprehensive profiling of food phytochemical metabolites in biofluids, allowing to consider not only the dietary intakes but also the metabolic capacity of the individuals.

3-To demonstrate in proof-of-concept studies the usefulness of these new dietary/exposure assessment methods to (re)investigate associations observed with body weight, obesity, and cardiometabolic outcomes in previous or new intervention or observational studies.

4-Beyond these scientific objectives, we aim to foster the capacity building of Early Career Scientists in the fields of food phytochemicals, metabolomics, dietary assessment, databases, and the prevention of obesity and cardiometabolic diseases

FOODPHYT in video!