Choline: The essential but forgotten nutrient

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.

Nutrition Training for Young Doctors Lacks Bite

October 25, 2017 – Most US medical schools do not require medical students to learn basic nutrition theory, even though poor diet is the leading preventable risk factor for disability or early death in the United States. “It takes at least 25-30 hours of medical school instruction to achieve just basic nutrition competencies,”

September 2017

The Ironies of Iron During Pregnancy Iron is listed by the American Pregnancy Association as one of the nutrients essential for healthy fetal development. Why? Because a lack of iron, a mineral naturally found in foods like meat, seafood and vegetables, directly...

Know Your Neurotransmitters: Acetylcholine

June 1, 2017 • It’s high time we covered acetylcholine — the most plentiful neurotransmitter in the body. And our Know Your Neurotransmitters series continues with the best guest possible to talk to us about acetylcholine: Dr. Steven Zeisel, MD, PhD. Dr. Zeisel, UNC Nutrition Research Institute Director, was involved in the first study of the effects of choline — the nutrient precursor to acetylcholine — on humans […]

May 2017

Shedding Light on Genetic Associations with Cancer Many of the genes we study at the NRI are involved in nutrient metabolism. One of the ways we can learn about what a gene does is to delete it in an animal model and then see how the gene-deleted animals differ from...

Whole Grains Prevent Chronic Lifestyle Disease in More Ways Than One

 May 1, 2017 • Whole grains have more health benefits to offer other than those from consuming fiber. These plant foods are also unique and rich sources of phytochemicals, bioactive compounds exclusively produced by plants that lower the risk of chronic disease. Whole grains contain dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals, and phytochemicals, but […]

Renowned Scientist Joins Nutrition Research Institute

November 30, 2016 • Susan Sumner, PhD joins the UNC Nutrition Research Institute (NRI) on December 1, 2016, as a Professor of metabolomicsNutrition. Dr. Sumner is working to make personalized medicine a reality through metabolomics. Metabolomics involves measuring thousands of metabolites in cells, tissues, and biological fluids.

November 2016

Do Eggs Cause Heart Disease? Several recent studies linked increased levels of a metabolic product of dietary choline with higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) (Wang  et al., 2011; Tang  et al., 2013) through a mechanism that involved gut microbiota-produced...