Our Research

The Unit's directorial team includes Professor Sally Poppitt, Professor Garth Cooper and Dr Jennifer Miles-Chan who have extensive experience performing nutrition intervention and observational trials in areas including:

  • Obesity and body-weight control

  • Regulation of appetite

  • Obesity related metabolic disorders

  • Cardiovascular risk, including dyslipidaemias

  • Pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes

  • Energy metabolism/nutritional energetics

  • Body Composition

Studies on health benefits of food components include investigations into:

  • Dietary lipids, including omega-3 fatty acids (fish oils and nuts)

  • Dietary proteins, including dairy proteins

  • Dietary carbohydrates, including soluble (ß-glucan) and insoluble dietary fibres

  • Plant Flavonoids

We conduct investigations into healthy men and women participants and participants with different states of metabolic health.

Trial Design

The Human Nutrition Unit carries out intervention trials investigating the relationships between diet and markers of health and disease.

Trials are randomised, placebo-controlled, single or double blind interventions and may be of either a cross-over or parallel design.

All trials are required to conform to human ethics procedures and good clinical practice (GCP), and human ethics committee approval is mandatory. Therapeutic trials are also required to obtain NZ Standing Committee on Therapeutic Trials (SCOTT) and MedSafe approval.

We can perform: