10.31.08
Unique nutrition research center marks milestone anniversary
HOUSTON -- (October 31, 2008) -- The Children's Nutrition Research Center has been focused on improving the health and well-being of children and pregnant women for three decades. Researchers and doctors there have made significant contributions to children's nutrition, and as the center celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, they are poised to make even more.
A collaboration of Baylor College of Medicine, the United States Department of Agriculture/Agriculture Research Service and Texas Children's Hospital, the center started with only a handful of staff members and research that focused almost exclusively on breastfeeding.
Today, the CNRC is home to more than 60 doctors and researchers and seven core laboratories. The center has conducted important research that has resulted in the development of national and international child nutrition standards.
Related video
(Flash player required)
Dr. Buford Nichols, professor of pediatrics at BCM, was the founding director of the CNRC in 1978. He led the center through significant expansion, including the move to its current building in 1988. A statue stands in the CNRC lobby that Nichols says symbolizes the center's work.
The statue, done by the 19th century German-born sculptor Elizabet Ney, depicts two little boys, one holding a torch, the other a key. "The torch represents an idea or a hypothesis, and the key represents the methodology for testing the hypothesis," Nichols explains.
"I think it signifies the fact that we're going to be smarter tomorrow than we are today. And that is the goal of our research as well – to keep improving our understanding of children's nutrition needs."
Important contributions
In its 30 years, the CNRC has had a significant impact in several key areas.
One of those areas is calorie intake. Research into energy intake and energy expenditures in infants and children showed that previous recommendations for calorie intake in infants was too high. New recommendations have been incorporated by the National Academy of Science and the World Health Organization, Nichols said.
CNRC researchers have also studied the growth of the body and the protein composition of the body, which led to the recommendation that children actually need more protein in their diet than previously thought by about 20 to 25 percent, according to Nichols. This standard has also been adopted nationally and internationally.
Research at the center has also led to nutritional standards for lactating women and the development of growth standards for breast-fed babies as well as formula-fed infants, which have been accepted as the official standard by the World Health Organization.
Evolving research
Dr. Dennis Bier, professor of pediatrics and current director of the CNRC, noted that the research at the CNRC has evolved over time.
"Newer questions have developed at the CNRC, and I would say they are really some very complicated questions," Bier said.
Some of the areas that researchers at the CNRC are now undertaking include issues of behavior and why people make the food choices they do, he said.
"We know a lot of the science of what people need nutritionally, but we really don't understand very well how children make food choices and how they use those choices to develop their nutritional habits," Bier said. "We also know that adults frequently know what the right choices are, but they don't always make them."
Genetic and epigenetic research is also being conducted to try to understand how nutrients and genes interact to affect nutritional health. "We don't understand how the ingredients in food affect the expression of genes that are important for health maintenance or disease prevention," Bier said.
One-of-a-kind research center
Bier says that the CNRC is truly a unique research center because of its mixture of scientists at different levels of nutritional science.
This mixture starts with plant scientists whose research at the greenhouse on top of the CNRC building seeks to understand the fundamental biology of plants and how nutrients can be enhanced in plants. The plant science division has the ability to grow crop plants that are labeled with nonradioactive tracers so they can actually study how the nutrients in plants enter the body and how they are metabolized.
Animal scientists are studying nutrition at the very fundamental levels of either molecular and cell biology of animal physiology and using these as models for humans.
Combine this with the researchers at the CNRC who study nutrition in both healthy people and those who have unique nutritional needs because of illness, and it makes for a mix that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, Bier said.
Permalink Comments off