Investigating how food and gut microbes interact to promote health.
Our Food, Microbiome and Health research programme focuses on the relationships between plant-based foods and human health, through integration of nutrition and agri-food science, and understanding the gastrointestinal tract’s microbiome within and beyond the gastrointestinal tract.
Poor diet accounts for 10 million (22%) of all adult deaths worldwide each year and in the UK costs the NHS £6 billion annually.
Plant-based foods can be deficient in essential nutrients, leading to a lack of key micronutrients. There is an urgent need to develop new foods that:
- improve metabolic and gut health
- tackle the societal challenge of poor diets low in plant-based foods
- optimise nutrient bioavailability of plant-based diets.
Our research is developing and trailing new plant-based food and microbiome-based intervention strategies to increase healthy human lifespans.
We study interactions between plant-based foods, the gut and our health both in our state-of-the-art laboratories and through clinical studies.
Our researchers use food analytics, gastrointestinal tract simulation models, multi-cellular models and super-resolution facilities to learn more about the complex relationship between our food, gut and health.
Our Food, Microbiome and Health research aims to increase healthy lifespans by:
- Determining macro and micro-nutrient bioavailability of nutritionally enhanced plant-based foods and factors that affect nutrient release.
- Identifying patterns in the gut microbiome associated with plant-based foods, including microbes that might give resilience to food-borne pathogens
- Learning how plant-based foods and food-induced changes in the gut microbiome affect human health beyond the gut, including understanding the gut-liver and gut-brain axis
- Evaluating the efficacy of food and microbiome interventions in improving long-term health including through proof-of-concept human studies.
Academic Partners
Key Strategic Partners


Brittany Hazard
Improving the health impact of wheat starch

Cathrina Edwards
Optimising nutrient release from plant-based foods

Fred Warren
Starch breakdown in the digestive tract

Lindsay Hall
Early life microbiota-host interactions

Martin Warren
Synthetic biology and biosynthetic pathways

Naiara Beraza
Mechanisms regulating the gut-liver axis during health and disease

Nathalie Juge
Glycobiology of host-microbe interactions in the gut

Paul Finglas
Food Databanks National Capability

Paul Kroon
Health benefits of dietary polyphenols

Pete Wilde
Food structure, colloids and digestion

Simon Carding
Gut microbes in health and disease

Stephen Robinson
Microbiota and vascular health

Tamas Korcsmaros
Systems Biology of Gut-Microbe Interactions