INQUAN – Integrity and Nutritional Quality
INQUAN includes issues relating to the relationship between food, nutrition and human health, the assessment and improvement of food safety and quality and their traceability, authenticity and sustainability.
Strategic Objective 1 – Food and human health
The aim is to: (1) promote the evaluation of the digestibility of foods and the bioavailability of the nutrients and bioactive components contained in them, in order to be able to evaluate their nutritional value in a more appropriate and adequate way; (2) use advanced technologies in order to improve knowledge about the metabolic and preventive effects of the diet as a whole, of foods and their components; (3) to select and validate biomarkers of efficacy of foods and / or food components in the prevention and maintenance of health, as well as markers to evaluate the intake of specific foods or food groups; (4) formulating, developing and validating foods for special purposes and for specific population groups; (5) formulate and develop new functional foods through the use of genetic selection techniques, the improvement of agronomic and breeding practices, the optimization of production, fortification and conservation processes and to validate their effectiveness in in-vitro and in-vivo systems; (6) to formulate food supplements.
Strategic Objective 2 – Food safety and quality
Methods and control systems for raw materials will be improved and contextualised, production and conservation processes developed and optimized, biological-chemical-physical risks inherent in the production, conservation and distribution of food will be assessed. The aim is to minimize the microbiological risk and to provide valid alternatives to the use of antibiotics and preservatives (for example through the use of natural antimicrobials), to use innovative fermentation processes, to optimize the shelf-life, with the ultimate goal of implement the technological, organoleptic-sensorial and nutritional qualities of food, particularly for high convenience products (frozen, IV and V range).
Strategic Objective 3 – Authenticity, traceability and sustainability of food
Markers will be selected and validated to guarantee the authenticity of food products and traceability systems (molecular and digital); systems will be proposed to evaluate and improve sustainability, not only environmental but also socio-economic of food production, from the field to the distribution.
