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...

Precision Nutrition Needed For Healthy Military Muscles By Allan Maurer, NCBiotech Writer Eat colorful meals and make sure you get enough choline. That’s the key advice two nutrition experts offered during lunch at the Medical, BioMedical & BioDefense: Support the...

NRI Grooms Next Gen Scientists When Grant Canipe graduated from Northwest Cabarrus in 2009, he joked that he was leaving Concord and never coming back. But in an interesting twist, he did come back and is now working as a scientist at the UNC Nutrition Research...

Know Your Neurotransmitters: Acetylcholine 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...

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...

Genetic Risk Factors for Some Diseases Tied to Uric Acid We once thought of circulating uric acid levels as mainly a biomarker of kidney disease (or a very rich diet), but research over the past decade suggests that higher than normal levels of uric acid can, in fact,...

Importance of Ratio in Essential Fatty Acids While omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies have been clearly linked to memory and learning problems in rodent models, studies involving dietary supplementation have produced mixed results. A contributing factor could be that the...

Breast Cancer Subtype Important in Deciding Impact of Folate It is generally known that folate (vitamin B9) is important in early pregnancy to prevent neural tube defects in babies, because folate is needed by rapidly dividing cells (e.g., those of a developing...

What We're Learning about Mom's Nutrition and Alcohol Dr. Phil May’s research group at the NRI studies the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) in humans. The recent addition to the NRI faculty of Dr. Susan Smith now provides an avenue toward...

Mom's Diet Can Affect Development of Next Two Generations Nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy can have lasting effects across generations that impact development not only of children, but also of grandchildren. These heritable effects are linked to epigenetic...