November 27, 2017 – Perhaps it’s because you don’t see it on nutrition labels yet, but choline — an essential nutrient from conception through old age — tends to be tragically overlooked. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, only 1 in 10 of us get enough choline, and those percentages drop among women during pregnancy — right when they need it most.

November 20, 2017 – Recommending proper nutrition can be difficult because not all people are the same, according to Dr. Steven Zeisel of the Kannapolis-based North Carolina Research Campus. “And that’s why nutrition research has been so frustrating. You read in Newsweek one week that you should drink less coffee and, the next week, you should drink more,” Zeisel said. He said much of the “fuzziness” in nutrition research has come from scientists not knowing why one person responds to a certain nutrient while others do not. That’s why his institute at the Research Campus is trying to be the leading group of faculty asking — and answering — that question.

October 25, 2017 – An interview with Steven H. Zeisel, MD, PhD, Kenan Distinguished University Professor of Nutrition and Pediatrics, and Director, UNC Nutrition Research Institute, Kannapolis, NC.
“In science, 10 percent of successful scientific discovery is the result of skill and hard work – but 90 percent comes from asking the right question. During my graduate training, I was very lucky to ask the right question. I wondered where the choline in acetylcholine comes from. Acetylcholine is an organic chemical that serves as a neurotransmitter – it’s released by nerve cells and sends signals to other cells, such as in muscles. At the time, all the textbooks stated that people could make their own supply of this nutrient in the liver and did not need to obtain it through food. I knew that this was not true for rats, mice and dogs, and I doubted it was true for people.