Mission Statement

The MDPRC mission is to bring together and fund the world’s leading scientists to research to understand how the modern food environment impacts human health and physiology.

Food For Thought…

In 1960, 13% of the US population was obese. Today the percentage is 36.5. Obesity in turn increases the risk for type II diabetes, which afflicted less than 1% of the population in 1960 and almost 25% today. Alarmingly, the combined overall relative risk for dementia is estimated at 73% higher in people with, compared to without, type II diabetes.  And then there are the known associations of obesity and diabetes with cancer and cardiovascular disease.  Put simply, the obesity epidemic is fueling the major killers of our time, costing billions of dollars and immeasurable suffering.  The tragic irony is that the obesity epidemic results directly from our food environment.

Our Origin

The Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center was established in 2016 to produce top-level, multi-disciplinary research to uncover the pathways that lead from the modern diet to disease with the aim of identifying innovative interventions, preventions and public health strategies.

The Problem

Most scientists agree that the astronomical rise in obesity and diabetes are caused by changes in the food environment. For decades now, researchers have been attempting to uncover the cause, and to date the focus has been on portion sizes, hyper-palatability, ubiquity and energy density. Although these factors are clearly involved in “energy imbalance,” recent findings suggests this is only part of the story. In other words, super-sized fast-food meals and sugar-sweetened beverages may not be the cause of our collective eating disorder so much as a symptom of a deeper malaise that is driving our behavior and our metabolism.

Processed foods deliver energy in doses and mixtures that are unlike the foods that shaped our physiology throughout evolution.

Today’s food costs less, is easier to obtain, and is metabolized faster than the foods we consumed during our evolutionary past. Modern food, furthermore, contains mixtures of nutrients and sensory cues such as artificial sweeteners and flavorings in doses and mixtures that are totally unknown in nature. The effects of this mismatch are the epidemics of obesity and diabetes, which in turn increase the risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. Emerging work suggests there is also a direct connection between diet and neurocognitive dysfunction in otherwise metabolically healthy individuals.

Scientists have been investigating obesity and metabolic disease, but this work has been highly independent in nature, with very little interaction between the extremely specialized departments that characterize modern science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), to use one example, are separated into silos that focus on metabolism (NIDDK), taste and flavor (NIDCD), addiction (NIDA) and motivated behavior (NIMH). The modern food environment presents a problem that requires focus on the intersection of these fields, which rarely takes place in research or at conferences. Furthermore, expertise in food sciences, which is essential to the development of processed foods by multinational food corporations is almost never integrated with expertise in neuroscience or metabolism and is entirely unsupported by NIH.

The Solution

By creating a multi-institutional cross-disciplinary center to support training, program development, and scientific investigation into the mechanisms by which diet leads to disease, the MDPRC strives to be part of the solution. Our initiatives range from a pilot project program to support new research programs and collaborations, the MDPRC investigator initiative to support established scientists with a track record for innovative science, and workshops and symposia to share ideas and engage the public and private sectors.