A healthy diet is always important, also when you’re working from home.

Radiation can be used to determine the isotope ratio of a skeleton. This provides information about where our ancestors lived and what they consumed. Dr Andrea Waters has developed a revolutionary method that can trace patterns of consumption from tens of thousands of years ago.

We know this, but we don’t act on it: eat healthily, move more, address our stress levels and sleep well. Internist and Professor of Diabetology Hanno Pijl is fascinated by the effect that a healthy lifestyle can have on health. He researches how this lifestyle is achievable and satisfying, for patients…

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.M. Brakefield, Prof.dr. B.J. Zwaan (Wageningen Universiteit)

The power of personalized nutrition lies in being able to conduct clinical research on healthy people while capturing metabolic markers sensitive to the impact of environmental and metabolic stressors (e.g. diet, changing sex hormones and the menstrual cycle).

The national dietary guidelines in Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, and Slovenia benefit nutrition, environment and animal welfare, Leiden environmental scientists write in the journal One Earth. However, the national guidelines of other countries face trade-offs, negatively impacting at…

What does it mean to eat healthily and responsibly? This question is gaining a new urgency now that in many countries undernourishment is being overtaken by diseases of affluence, such as obesity, and we are also becoming more aware of the environmental impact of our eating habits. It’s time to take…

Many children eat too many high-calorie foods and too few vegetables from an early age. PhD candidate Merel van Vliet researched the role of parents in this. ‘Don’t force children to clean their plates.’ PhD defence on 15 June.

Do selenium nanoparticles in fish food cause subtle alterations in behavior of fish: effect of particles size and concentration?

Chemistry is all around us: from nutrition and smartphones to medicine. The field is developing rapidly, as the world population continues to grow and resources become scarce. MST will educate you on the basics of working towards a clean and healthy world.

In November we went to a real, biodynamic farm (Kwekerij Eko Logisch) and listened to David, a farmer who believes you can limit harm to the environment while still growing heaps of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. On the two-hour visit, we were shown around the farm and even encountered some animals.

This project intends to provide the required knowledgebase for the design of novel mild intervention protocols to prevent fungal food spoilage.

Promotores: G. Persoon, R. Schefold

Dr. Doris M. Jacobs, Lead Scientist at Unilever R&D, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

PhD defence

Can the venom of snakes, scorpions and other animals be sources of new antibiotics?

This project develops a scientific method to extract clinically relevant new information from patient forum websites that discuss patient experiences concerning e.g. medication, nutrition, co-morbidities, genetic factors etc.

Promotor: G.R. de Snoo, W. Kustiawan, Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

Bacteria in the teeth tell us a lot about nutrition and disease in our ancestors. It also tells us more about the immune system. This provides clues for treating modern diseases and allergies. For a long time archaeologists were irritated by tartar on the teeth of excavated skulls. They thought that…

The HARVEST project explores the dietary choices that our hominin ancestors and relatives made, by recovering information on what they consumed, and how factors like environmental variation, intrinsic biology, and development of food processing technologies could have influenced their decisions.

We train our researchers and students in how to use laboratory animals in a responsible manor in their research. The attitude of the researcher towards the animals is crucial here.

What are the global relationships between environmental conditions and abundance of distinct types of mycorrhizal fungi in soil and plant roots?

Bones contain information about people’s lives such as where they came from, their age at death and which diseases they suffered from. Researchers can deduce a lot from them about a person’s life and about human evolution. This generates leads that could help solve present-day problems, such as how…

Are traces of fire use detectable in ancient hominin genomes?

Leiden University and LUMC benefit from unique knowledge gained from research and teaching about healthy lifestyles. We want to bring this knowledge together into one place, and we want to share it even more effectively than we do now.

As a new vision on food production, the feasibility study on LED light to grow crops with the biological- and chemical evaluation of final products.

Accumulation of metals in economy and environment and its associated risks, within the Netherlands and the EU.

Which microorganisms live near and inside plant roots? How do they contribute to plant health? Can microorganisms be employed in plant protection?

How do different communities of residents in The Hague perceive and manage food waste in relation to citizenship (rights and responsibilities)?

The Leiden Index of Depression Sensitivity (LEIDS) measures cognitive reactivity (CR) to sadness, an aspect of cognitive vulnerability to depression, conceptually similar to rumination.

A plant-based diet could improve the resilience of our food system. Moving to such a diet in the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK) alone could replace almost all the production losses from Russia and Ukraine. That’s what an international team of researchers conclude in Nature Food. Leiden…

Issues such as climate change, the depletion of natural resources or social inequality are too complex to be addressed from a single scientific discipline or by a single country. Leiden University has the expertise to bring the resolution of these enormous problems a small step closer.

LUMC researchers are looking for factors that point to illness at an early stage.

LUMC researchers are looking for factors that point to illness at an early stage.

Evaluating the environmental consequences of diet changes in the European Union.

Front-of-pack nutrition labelling, origin labelling, regulation of voluntary green claims made by food business operators: the EU is currently looking into various reforms of the legal framework for food information to consumers. The goal: healthier and more sustainable diets.

Colleagues from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences work on a variety of topics that contribute to a healthy society. Erik Bähre, Tessa Minter and Natashe Lemos Dekker presented their work during the Healthy Society Event on 9 June 2022.

The way that traditional hunter-gatherers roasted tubers can shed new light on how people prepared food in prehistoric times. Archaeologist Stephanie Schnorr has studied the food preparation culture of the Hadza in Tanzania.

The research article ‘The life history of an enslaved African’ is one of the top 20 read Archaeometry articles in the period of January 2017 to December 2018.

Are you interested in international justice, world politics, cultural diversity, socio-economic integration, health, the environment, climate change, alternative energy strategies, decision-making processes or human security? If so, LUC has a Major for you!

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

This project has two main aims: I. Determine when novelty promotes fear extinction. II. Discover the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these effects.

Evidence and Care-work in a home visiting program to promote maternal sensitivity and parental reflective functioning in Alexandra township, Johannesburg, South Africa.

In honour of Krijn Rietveld (1956 - 2018), Leiden University Fund and Royal DSM have created the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Innovation Award. This annual award was launched in 2020 and is organised to recognise and reward excellence in innovative research that contributes to a more sustainable world.