The REP-EAT project is an innovative, multi-disciplinary and cross-sector Doctoral Programme addressing the relations between food habits and reproductive health (REP) and eating disorders (EAT).
The project focussed on three main problems:
1) Nutrition science has greatly developed in the past decades, turning from the consideration of foods as simply energy sources to the recognition of their role in maintaining health and in reducing the incidence of diseases. Nevertheless, very limited is the knowledge on food-related mechanism affecting human and animal physiology. New analytical methods help in clarifying these aspect, mainly related to the holistic omics approach. In theory, they can offer new instruments to connect food components, diet, individual diet habit to health and diseases. In practice, we are still far to understand these connection, which needs not only technologies but mainly a broad “foodomics” vision.
2) Even if eating disorders are relatively common, they are often overlooked although they are associated with high comorbidity and serious health consequences. At EU level, eating disorders result in about 7,000 deaths a year, making them the mental illnesses with the highest mortality rate with a mean cost per discharge of a person risen by 29% over a decade (WHO, 2016).
3) The impact of food habits on reproductive health starts to be comprised in its powerful, even if remain to clarify the mechanism involved. Food may influence individual reproductive function by operating at each reproductive step. The environmental effectors (food included) might exert their influences immediately, hampering gametes/embryo/foetal development, or later in the adult life, in what has been defined the “Barker Hypothesis”: the embryo/foetal exposure to various stressors results in “programming” the genome for the onset of cardiovascular, metabolic diseases in the adult, or even transmitted to the next generation by compromising the birth of a living newborn but also unpredictable long term effect on adult animals and human well-being.
Consequently, the overall objectives of the project are:
• Develop translational approaches (animal vs. human) and multidisciplinary research teams to successfully address the current challenges thus creating the unique operative condition to understand lifestyle factors (toxic or bioactive food compounds, nutraceuticals), their interactions and the extent to which they contribute to health preservation and/or to disease development;
• Train a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), who can handle effectively with the new frontiers and advances in food and health disciplines.
