Question: What type of experiments do you do to understand how foods make us healthy?

To understand how foods make us healthy I do experiments in three main ways.
1. In vitro – this is real lab based, growing cells in an incubator (oven) adding in or taking away specific parts of vitamins and minerals.
2. Animal models. we use both rat, mouse and pigs – we create the diet/food that we wish to investigate, feed it to the animals, then examine how this food has affected the animals.
3. human. (this is my favorite!) Once we have enough evidence we will design a specific diet and exercise program for people. Usually we design this type of study to help people. These studies are designed to find out which diet is best for weight loss in people who are overwieght, or to help people manage their diabetes or reduce their chance of having a heart attack.
we measure lots of things to work out how these foods make us healthy. We have scales, and tape measures, heart rate and blood pressure monitors, in the lab we can look at the amount of fat in the blood, we also measure the amount of damage done to the persons DNA, look at the microorganisms that live in the gut, we measure strength of muscle, we measure brain function as well.