Our health is determined by what we eat and by the diet and production conditions of the animals we consume. The single nutrient approach, which demonises fat, carbohydrates or sugar as individual causes of the obesity crisis has now run its course.

We provide a framework for not only thinking about, but also experimentally testing issues around dietary balance. We seek to understand and optimise the relationships between the diets and the rearing conditions of production animals, their nutritional composition, and impact on human health. 

When animals are harvested from the wild, we have little influence over their diet and body compositions, but when they are sourced from agriculture, it’s somewhat within our control.

Using nutritional geometry, the study of how nutrients and other dietary components influence health and disease, to construct explanatory and predictive models of animal production systems.

Rather than focusing on any one nutrient in isolation, we provide a unique method of unifying observations from many fields so we can better understand how nutrients, foods and diets interact to affect health and disease in humans.

Our work assists researchers in observing otherwise overlooked patterns in the links between certain diets, health and disease.

We will use nutritional geometry in combination with experiments and analysis of data from our recently published literature to construct predictive models of animal production systems. 

• Professor Margaret Allman-Farinelli
• Associate Professor Anna Rangan
• Associate Professor Joy Becker
• Associate Professor Alex Chaves
• Associate Professor Aaron Cowieson
• Dr Sonia Liu
• Dr Gabriel Machovsky-Capuska (Project Node Leader)
• Professor David Raubenheimer (Project Node Leader)
• Professor Stephen Simpson