NUTRIDENT | Towards Functional Foods

Academic Centre for Dentistry Amstersdam
University of Genoa
Göteborg University
University of Pavia
Givaudan
University of Tel Aviv
UCL Eastman Dental Institute
University of Verona

NUTRIDENT is a € 2.2M specific targeted research project entitled "Towards functional foods for oral health care - isolation, identification and evaluation of beverage and food components with anti-caries and/or anti-gingivitis activities."

The joint project is co-ordinated by UCL Eastman Dental Institute and is a European collaboration with academic partners at the University of Pavia, University of Tel Aviv, University of Genoa, Göteborg University, Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam and the University of Verona as well as our industrial partners Givaudan.

The objective of NUTRIDENT is to identify and investigate the effects of beverage and food components on the development of major dental diseases.

Dental caries and gingivitis are the most prevalent infectious diseases of humans and are due to the accumulation of dental plaque (a bacterial biofilm) on the tooth surface and at the gingival margin respectively.

There is evidence that certain beverages and foods can protect against caries and gingivitis and this proposal is designed to build upon this work in order to identify beverage/food constituents that could help to maintain oral health. Such constituents could be incorporated into functional foods and/or into oral healthcare products such as chewing gum and toothpaste.

Benefits of this approach to oral healthcare would be enormous and would include:

• an improvement in oral health - because of the ease of use of functional foods compared to tooth brushing and flossing

• a reduction in the costs of governmental oral healthcare budgets

• opportunities for wealth creation - the market for consumer oral health care products is enormous (amounting to €17 billion in 2004) and functional foods and new oral health care formulations would be able to capture some of this market.

The research programme involving the following stages:

• Selection of potentially useful beverages and foods based on data in the literature.

• Screening of these materials for biological activities relevant to the prevention of caries and/or gingivitis.

• Isolation of the active constituents of the materials.

• Toxicological assessment (if necessary) of candidate materials.

• Production of large quantities of candidate materials.

• Clinical evaluation of the candidate materials in four different European countries.

• Incorporation of the candidate materials into formulations suitable for use in functional foods and/or oral healthcare products.

This page was last modified September 2008