Project leader: S. Salentinig

Team: A. Fink, B. Rothen-Rutishauser, U. Steiner

Functional food materials that tailor the digestion process and deliver nutrients can help maintaining and even improving human health and lifestyle. For their design, natural food emulsions such as milk are a valuable source of inspiration – they have been optimised by evolution over millions of years to secure development and survival. These systems were found to undergo a range of chemical and colloidal transformations in the human digestive tract to tailor the uptake of nutrients into the body. Inspired by our recent discovery of the digestion-triggered formation of liquid crystalline nanocarriers in such food emulsions, the global research vision and the ultimate goal in this project is the design of nature-inspired functional food materials. These materials will be tailored to the personal require­ments of the patient, for instance, to secure nutrient and drug uptake during digestive disorders.