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Publications
Publications (67)
Vernieuwde visie van de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor Integrale Duurzame Landbouw en Voeding. De Raad pleit voor een fundmentele paradigmashift van lage voedselprijzen en korte-termijnefficientie naar een systeem dat gezondheid vooropstelt.
Purpose: The ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) framework (used worldwide to describe ‘functioning’ and ‘disability’), including the ICF scheme (visualization of functioning as result of interaction with health condition and contextual factors), needs reconsideration. The purpose of this article is to discuss a...
Open Access available at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fimmu.2016.00587/full
In order to combat chronic immune disorders (CIDs), it is an absolute necessity to understand the bigger picture, one that goes beyond insights at a one-disease, molecular, cellular, and static level. To unravel this bigger picture we advocate an integral,...
Toen wij in 2011 in de BMJ¹onze nieuwe omschrijving van gezondheid voorstelden: ‘Health as the ability to adapt and to self manage in the face of the social, physical and emotional challenges of life’, beoogden wij een discussie op gang te brengen over de definitie van de WHO en ons voorgestelde concept. Dus de uitdrukking die Poiesz, Caris en Lapr...
A new, dynamic concept of health, which aims to convince critics of the static WHO definition of 1948, was based on an invitational conference in 2009. The concept highlights function, resilience and self-direction. This general concept of health was further elaborated in a follow-up study aiming towards operationalization, and involving Dutch heal...
Objective To evaluate among stakeholders the support for the new, dynamic concept of health, as published in 2011: ‘Health as the ability to adapt and to self-manage’, and to elaborate perceived indicators of health in order to make the concept measurable.
Design A mixed methods study: a qualitative first step with interviews and focus groups, foll...
Huber beschrijft de ontwikkeling van een nieuw concept van gezondheid, waarin functioneren, veerkracht en eigen regie centraal staan. Dit concept blijkt veel draagvlak te hebben bij belanghebbenden, maar bij de operationalisering ervan blijken patiënten een veel bredere invulling van gezondheid te hebben dan hun behandelaren. De brede opvatting van...
The biocrystallization method is based on the phenomenon that additive-specific, dendritic crystallization patterns emerge when an aqueous dihydrate cupric chloride solution with additives is crystallized on a glass plate. The patterns reflect physiological processes like ripening and decomposition and are applied in differentiating food samples ac...
Laat ik met mijn conclusie beginnen en die is dat ik het begrip ‘gezondheidskapitaal’ een sterk en veelbelovend begrip vind, dat een waardevolle aanvulling kan betekenen in de ontwikkeling van een brede visie én breed beleid op gezondheid! Graag geef ik nog wat commentaar bij de tekst van Marleen Bekker. In aanvulling op de beschrijving van de reac...
For decades, organic agriculture developed strategies to produce plant and animal foods with mandatory high standards based on certification at the production and processing levels. This coincided with the growing demand of consumers for accessible, environmentally-friendly, nutritional and safe foods. In this context, although limited and difficul...
Background:
Alternative lifestyles are often associated with distinct practices with respect to nutrition, physical activity, smoking, alcohol use and usage of complementary medicine. Evidence concerning effects of these lifestyle-related practices on health status is still fragmentary.
Objective:
To describe maternal health characteristics rela...
Met ‘HEALTH - time for a new definition?’ op de cover introduceerde de BMJ in 2011 ons artikel1 met een nieuwe, dynamische omschrijving van gezondheid: ‘Health as the ability to adapt and to self manage, in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges’.
A review of recent literature pertaining to organic and functional food was conducted according its conceptual background. Functional and organic food both belong to fast growing segments of the European food market. Both are food according to the European food regulations, but organic food is further regulated by the European regulation for organi...
Consumers buy organic food because they believe in the high quality of the product. Furthermore, the EU legal regulatory framework for organic food and farming defines high quality of the products as an important goal of production. A major challenge is the need to define food quality concepts and methods for determination. A background is describe...
The health benefits of consuming organically produced foods compared with conventional foods are unclear. Important obstacles to drawing clear conclusions in this field of research are (1) the lack of a clear operational definition of health and (2) the inability to distinguish between different levels of health using valid biomarkers. In this pape...
Background: Alternative lifestyles are often associated with distinct practices with respect to nutrition, physical activity, smoking, alcohol use and usage of complementary medicine. Evidence concerning effects of these lifestyle-related practices on health status is still fragmentary. Objective: To describe maternal health characteristics related...
The aim of this study was to apply an untargeted NMR and LC-MS-based metabolomics approach to detect potential differences between an organically and a conventionally produced feed, which caused statistically significant differences in growth, in the response to an immunological challenge and in the gene expression profiles in the small intestine o...
Background & Study design Consumers expect products from organic agriculture to be healthier, but limited research is available about health effects of organic food products. Our study Organic More Healthy? aimed to identify relevant biomarkers of health to enable future studies in humans. A feeding experiment was performed in two generations of th...
Sustainable agriculture and healthy nutrition are high on the social agenda. Work is now being done to face both challenges, often with measurable success. However, huge changes are still needed and some problems have even been exacerbated. Although agriculture and nutrition are closely linked, both issues are often dealt with in isolation. The pro...
Duurzame landbouw en gezonde voeding staan hoog op de maatschappelijke agenda. Aan beide uitdagingen wordt gewerkt en daarbij zijn diverse successen geboekt. Maar er zijn nog grote veranderingen nodig en sommige problemen zijn juist toegenomen. Hoewel landbouw en voeding nauw samenhangen worden beide vraagstukken nog vaak gescheiden aangepakt. De p...
The paper gives an overview of recent studies investigating the health value of organic foods and presents a framework for estimating the scientific impact of these studies. Furthermore, the problems connected with the different research approaches are being discussed. A number of comparative studies showed lower nitrate contents and less pesticide...
Our previous work showed that incorporation of organic dairy products in the maternal diet may lead to increased contents
of the conjugated linoleic acid isomers (CLA) in human breast milk, which might positively affect infant’s health. Now, the
effect of biodynamic—a special form of organic—dairy products in the diet on the CLA content in human br...
The paper illustrates the role and activities of Technology Platform Organics (TP Organics) in addressing the requirement that research in organic food and farming systems generates output of relevance to wider end-users. It describes approaches to research and knowledge exchange and suggests that a more participatory approach can improve organic r...
The current WHO definition of health, formulated in 1948,
describes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and
social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or
infirmity.”1 At that time this formulation was groundbreaking
because of its breadth and ambition. It overcame the negative
definition of health as absence of disease and...
One of the explanations for the increasing prevalence of atopic diseases is a relative low perinatal supply of n-3 fatty acids. However, this does not explain the protective effects of whole-fat dairy products or high levels of transfatty acids in breast milk, observed in some studies. We evaluated the role of perinatal supply of fatty acids in the...
Consumers expect organic products to be healthier. However, limited research has been performed to study the effect of organic food on health. The present study aimed to identify biomarkers of health to enable future studies in human subjects. A feeding experiment was performed in two generations of three groups of chickens differing in immune resp...
The need for better regulatory guidelines, improved testing methods, and additional research into product quality criteria to further develop the European organic food market is discussed. The European Commission (EC) regulations on organic production focus on practical agronomy but are very limited in relation to processing. Only limited food addi...
The trans fatty acid (TFA) patterns in the fats of ruminant meat and dairy products differ from those found in other (processed) fats. We have evaluated different TFA isomers in human breast milk as an indicator of dietary intake of ruminant and dairy fats of different origins. Breast milk samples were collected 1 month postpartum from 310 mothers...
Feeding experiments comparing organically and conventionally produced food are performed to assess the overall impact on the animals' health as a model for the effects experienced by the human consumers. These experiments are based on systems research and characterized by their focus on production methods, whole food testing and procedures in accor...
The growing organic market demands methods which can describe food quality within the organic system. With the Steigbild technique, patterns are produced on thin-layer chromatographic paper and evaluated as a fingerprint of the sample as a whole. To be applied in routine analysis the method has to be standardized. After the laboratory process was d...
The growing organic market demands methods which can describe food quality within the organic system (authentication). Several studies indicate that methods, such as the biocrystallization method, are suitable for this question. More or less reproducible crystallization patterns emerge when an aqueous dihydrate cupric chloride solution with plant e...
The biocrystallization method has been used as a holistic method for evaluating food samples since the 1930s and has, as recent reviews have concluded, been successful in discriminating farming systems in several studies. However, it is noted that a standardization and validation for more objective means of evaluation of biocrystallization pictures...
Using a nutrigenomics approach we studied the response of second-generation chickens at a transcriptional level to organically grown feed ingredients compared with conventionally grown feed ingredients. Both diets consisted of the same amounts of ingredients, the only difference was the production method. Gene expression was analysed in jejuni usin...
The biocrystallization method has been standardized for plant products. The standardized biocrys-tallization method is tested on milk and butter samples from controlled feeding trials. When computerized image analy-sis is applied, samples from diVerent origins (feeding regimes) can be distinguished signiWcantly.
In het kader van het project duurzaamheidprestaties (BO-04-001-039) is een overzicht gemaakt van de recente literatuur op het gebied van voedselkwaliteit, voedselveiligheid en gezondheid van biologische producten. Recente literatuur is gezocht in peer-reviewed tijdschriften via verschillende literatuurzoeksystemen. Daarnaast is gebruik gemaakt van...
QLIF researchers have quantified effects on food quality and health of products such as wheat, forage, apples, milk and meat. The workshop identifies factors which cause variation of the product quality for different commodities. Experimental findings on quality of organic and low input foods will be compared with consumer expectations and attitude...
We prospectively investigated whether organic food consumption by infants was associated with developing atopic manifestations in the first 2 years of life. The KOALA Birth Cohort Study in the Netherlands (n 2764) measured organic food consumption, eczema and wheeze in infants until age 2 years using repeated questionnaires. Diet was defined as con...
Organic production methods have in the past been shown to have benefits for the environment, biodiversity, soil quality, animal welfare and reduced pesticide residues. In addition to these qualities they may also contribute directly to human health. In an exploratory study, raw (bulk) cow's milk from five organic and five neighbouring conventional...
Publisher Summary
Consumers expect organic producers to provide healthy and tasty products. In the conventional vision, product quality is mainly based on external, nutritive, and sensory properties and is strongly directed by traders and trends. Besides tastiness and ripeness, organic consumers expect products to have properties such as “vitality”...
The aim of the present study was to find out whether the incorporation of organic dairy and meat products in the maternal diet affects the contents of the conjugated linoleic acid isomers (CLA) and trans-vaccenic acid (TVA) in human breast milk. To this purpose, milk samples from 312 breastfeeding mothers participating in the KOALA Birth Cohort Stu...
Antibiotic exposure in early life may be associated with atopic disease development either by interfering with bacterial commensal flora or by modifying the course of bacterial infections. We evaluated early life exposure to antibiotics and the subsequent development of eczema, wheeze, and allergic sensitization in infancy.
Information on antibioti...
Atopic parents may adopt lifestyle characteristics that allegedly protect against atopic disease. If this is true, infants from atopic parents will be characterized by low-risk behaviour. Consequently, aetiologic studies on lifestyle factors and allergic disease in childhood may be biased by confounding by indication.
We explored whether the preval...
The growing organic market demands for methods which can describe food quality within the organic system. With the capillary dynamolysis tech- nique patterns are produced on thin-layer chroma- tographic paper and evaluated as a fingerprint of the sample as a whole. To be applied in routine analysis the method has to be standardised according to int...
The anthroposophic lifestyle has several features of interest in relation to allergy: for example, a restrictive use of antibiotics and certain vaccinations. In a previous Swedish study, Steiner school children (who often have an anthroposophic lifestyle) showed a reduced risk of atopy, but specific protective factors could not be identified.
To in...
The aim of the KOALA Birth Cohort Study in the Netherlands is to identify factors that influence the clinical expression of atopic disease with a main focus on lifestyle (e.g., anthroposophy, vaccinations, antibiotics, dietary habits, breastfeeding and breast milk composition, intestinal microflora composition, infections during the first year of l...
Summary An integral part of the biocrystallization method is the determination of suitable concentrations of the sample in question and the reagent copper chloride. Traditionally concentrations series are applied whereby an in- creasing amount of sample (juice/extract) is added to a fixed amount of reagent (200 mg per solution per plate). At a so-c...
How can we adequately express the quality of food produced by organic agriculture? To answer this research question, we defined a concept of 'inner quality' (formerly called 'vital quality') based on the life processes growth and differentiation, and their integration. Growers use management methods to influence life processes in their crops, thus...
The commonly used concept of quality in relation to food, with its emphasis on external appearance and nutritional content is not sufficient for organic products and their market. In response a quality concept known as 'vital quality' has been developed based on the life processes (growth and differentiation) and corresponding product attributes (v...
The TP Organics Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) was finalised in December 2009.
The purpose of the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is to enable research, development and knowledge transfer that will deliver relevant outcomes – results that will contribute to the improvement of the organic sector and other low external input systems.
The document...
