Profile

I live in Newcastle upon Tyne with my husband. Between us we have 5 children, 5 grandchildren and a dog. I’m Danish, my husband is English and other family members are Norwegian, Kenyan and Vietnamese.

I’ve got a garden and 45 pot plants, mostly orchids, and my husband has a boat in Denmark that we live on when visiting family. Fortunately orchids can survive long periods without water!

For my research, my research students and I investigate the constituents of vegetables which are responsible for making us healthier when we eat veggies. Many other scientists have looked for this, but they struggled to find the right compounds.  Nutrients are vitamins and minerals that we know are necessary for our health, we will get ill if we don’t get enough of each nutrient every week. Vegetables contain a lot of certain nutrients, but the vegetable nutrients are so common in other foods as well, that we don’t really need to eat vegetables to get all the nutrients that we need. This shows that nutrients from vegetables cannot be the cause of the benefits of eating veggies! I am now investigating something else in vegetables, bioactive compounds, to find out if they are what makes us healthier. Bioactive compounds are not nutrients, they are more like drugs: We can be healthy even if we don’t eat any of them, and if we eat too much of them they can be toxic. Bioactive compounds usually give a bitter taste, which is very useful, since this keeps us from eating too much of them! An example of a bioactive compound from plants is caffeine, which occurs in the plants that are used to make tea, coffee and cola.

My hypothesis is that eating these ‘almost-toxic’ compounds helps keep our cells fit and active, so the cells will be stronger if affected by a disease. Like exercise, which also is not required to stay alive, and makes us tired and aching when we do it, but afterwards our bodies become stronger and able to achieve more than without the exercise.

I also teach and supervise undergraduate and post graduate students in nutrition and food science at the University, and work with companies to test if their products have beneficial properties.

Most work days during term time I have one or more lectures or practicals, so much of my time is spent preparing for teaching or marking reports or exam scripts. Often I meet with students or colleagues or clients to discuss research etc., and when there is time, I also write publications based on the results of the research.