Health Sciences

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    • Building Healthy Rural Communities
    • Food for Life, Health and Performance
    • Sex, Health and Society
    • Healthy Motherhood
    • Human Movement and Sports Science
    • Living with Disability
    • Physical Activity and Rehabilitation
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Food is necessary for life, but without the right amount and type of food we are unlikely to achieve optimal health or performance. This emerging research focus area of Food for Life, Health and Performance encompasses the application of food and nutrition across the whole spectrum with a primary focus on obesity and chronic disease.

Obesity and consequently type 2 diabetes prevalence continues to rise in Australia despite current therapeutic efforts. Around 1 in 4 Australian adults and children (aged 5-17 years) are overweight or obese, being among the highest rates in the world. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes and continues to be the primary cause of death in Australia and the major contributor to Australia’s health and economic burden.

Poor nutrition is a major preventable risk factor in the aetiology of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Nutrition intervention programs can be effective in weight loss and CVD risk reduction in the short-term but tend to fail in the long term due to individual and societal factors.

Our key purpose is to build palatable, food-based diet and lifestyle intervention strategies, which are sustainable and focused on retention of culture and cuisine for the maintenance of health and prevention and management of obesity and chronic disease.

Our strength is our breadth of methodological research skills and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Our collaborations with agricultural and veterinary science, and  biochemistry at La Trobe informs  our food-based intervention models, our animal to human clinical trials models, and measurement of dietary biomarkers. We have established long-standing research links with health services and medical schools for our clinical intervention trials (in cardiology, endocrinology, gastrointestinal health, depression, malnutrition). We have established leadership in the areas of Mediterranean diet interventions and dietary interventions for Coeliac Disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We have recently established strong links with the elite sports industry (AFL, Soccer) to investigate the impact of improved nutrition on sport performance. We will continue to build links with other disciplines in public health, exercise science, psychology, health economics, and others to continue to develop cost-effective multi-disciplinary interventions targeting the obesity-diabetes epidemic.

Program Research Questions:

Our key research questions fall under 4 themes:

Obesity and Metabolic Health

Novel ways of approaching obesity and metabolic disease prevention and management for long-term success, encompassing:

• Intervention models based on traditional cuisines, e.g.  Mediterranean diet
• Bioactive components of diet (herbs and spices, n-3 fatty acids, carotenoids)
• Nutrigenomics

Food and Culture

The study of retention of traditional dietary practices in the maintenance of health and the impact of migration on food, culture and health.

Malnutrition and Specific Clinical Disorders:

Managing malnutrition (over and under nutrition) in high risk groups.
The role of diet in the pathophysiology and short and long term management of functional gastrointestinal disorders and associated co-morbidities.

Food and Performance

Nutrition interventions for optimal body composition, sport performance and cognition.

Catherine is the Head of Department and Associate Professor in Dietetics and Human Nutrition at La Trobe University.

Catherine Itsiopoulos, Health Sciences