The real challenge in the food arena is to produce functional food sustainably that is both nutritious and affordable, says Ioannis Zabetakis, Assistant Professor of Food Chemistry, at the University of Athens, Greece. This task is not an easy one. We need to combine good management practices, use resources effectively, make sensible use of water and also invent novel foods with more “good” calories and fewer “bad” calories and also with enhanced functional properties against cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), diabetes and obesity. Feed Conversion Rate In terms of ... Read on...

SciScoop's Food Security blogger Ioannis Zabetakis takes a look at recent controversy surrounding glyphosate (Roundup) In the 1990s, I was studying and then teaching in the University of Leeds and those years were full of the "mad cow disease" scandal and the (still) ongoing debate on GM foods. Both the scientific community and society at large now know that by pressing the land or the animals to produce more, we are causing many undesired side effects and creating, possibly unnecessary, risks to the food chain. The 2005 ... Read on...

A new guest post on food security from Ioannis Zabetakis, Assistant Professor of Food Chemistry, Lab. of Food Chemistry, Dept. of Chemistry, Univ. of Athens, Athens, Greece. Zabetakis also blogs here. In order to evaluate the functionality of food components or chemical compounds against the development of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs), we need to study the mechanism of how these compounds can inhibit or delay the onset of CVDs. It is widely accepted today that inflammation is linked to CVDs and the key trigger molecule there is the so called ... Read on...