Frost Nutrition Research Laboratory

Non-communicable diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer are major causes of morbidity and morality globally, yet the prevalence of these diseases continues to rise. The risk of developing non communicable disease is increased by poor lifestyle, particularly diet. However, this risk varies between individuals, one of the aims of our research group is to understand this.

UK Obesity rates are the highest in Europe, with more than 60% of the population overweight or obese. If trends continue 40% of the UK population will be obese by 2025 and this creates a huge burden on the NHS as obesity-related conditions currently cost the NHS on average £5bn a year. Many interventions deployed by health systems have failed to improve healthy behaviour in a sustained way over the life cycle. The vast majority failed to account for the individual genotype specificities and biological environmental factors. Few attempts have been made to systematically link and triangulate different sources of biological, socioeconomic, and behavioural data to look at the overall processes and simultaneously for the interplay of genetic, epigenetic, psychological, behavioural, socio-economic and long-term consequences of an intervention on nutrition and metabolic health.

In order for basic biological research into nutrition to be used to maintain and improve health and wellbeing, it is key to understand how food and nutrition interplay with physiology, preferences, psychology, socio-economic variables, behaviour and policy interventions. Research in the social and behavioural sciences has not yet, for example fully engaged with the so-called ‘epigenetics revolution’ in biology, that is, the growing evidence that differences in genetically identical individuals may be explained by epigenetic alterations in DNA and its accompanying proteins.

The research we carry out has a direct effect on patient care or public health. Most of our work is aimed at the prevention of disease, so understanding mechanisms that lead to increased risk of disease and then investigating how to prevent this. 

Leveraging the interdisciplinary research at Imperial College we undertake high-quality multidisciplinary research at the interface between the social and biological sciences, to develop sustainable strategies fully embedded in the healthcare ecosystem to fight the obesity epidemic, promote the wellbeing of the population, mitigate its impact on the economy including on the financial sustainability of health systems.

1. The role of propionate in the prevention of weight gain in young adults
2. Management of obesity
3. New methods of dietary assessment
4. Development of tools to understand individual variations in diet
5. The relationship between food, gastrointestinal physiology and metabolic disease
6. The development and use of human gastrointestinal models including organoids and gut on a chip to understand the mechanistic relationship between food and the gastrointestinal tract
7. Nutritional management of severe malnutrition in developing countries
8. Nutrition Sensing and ageing