The MU Nutritional Center for Health and the Physical Activity and Wellness Program researchers are collaborating in the fight against obesity.
More than a third of U.S. adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the past, researchers from different departments have worked on their own separate solutions to the obesity and obesity-related problems, including overeating, sedentary lifestyles and obesity-related diseases.
Now, thanks to the ideas of Chris Hardin, professor and chairman of nutritional sciences, MUNCH is a place for researchers across departments to collaborate on obesity and its related diseases.
The headquarters is in a previously neglected space in Gwynn Hall.
“The space was downright decrepit,” Hardin said. “I would have probably been the subject of a lawsuit had I put people down there. We used to call taking people through there the ‘Tetanus Tour’ or the ‘Dungeon Tour,’ and that was not an exaggeration. The basement was downright scary, completely unusable. However, it was space.”
MUNCH’s renovated facilities include two kitchens — one educational and one a research metabolic kitchen — and an observational lab. The space also includes an adjacent human research area for PAW’s work along with other research facilities.
PAW works with MUNCH by using its labs to evaluate the biological and medical impact on the research volunteers participating in the studies.
Research volunteers go about their daily lives while eating food MUNCH provides for them. Hardin likes to call them “free range humans.”
The metabolic kitchen is designed specifically to allow full control over the specific ingredients involved in the feeding studies. Having full control over what people are eating and drinking in these studies is important to maintain scientific accuracy.
Education is a vital piece of the solution to a problem. MUNCH’s educational kitchen allows MUNCH researchers to work on a variety of projects, educating people across society. It currently includes innovative technologies and new-fangled contraptions to allow researchers to study children’s food choice behavior and do cooking demonstrations.
“We really lost a generation of people who know how to cook,” Hardin said. “If we can teach people how to cook healthy but still tasty meals, that could go a long way towards combating the obesity epidemic.”
Knowing how people’s choices are made is where MUNCH’s observational lab comes into play. The lab will be able to take the research one step further by observing how people react to food. In the future, the team hopes to observe how children, especially, react to varying kinds of food.
“I think child food choice behavior and child food acceptance is extremely important,” Hardin said.
Kids with obesity are at higher risk for a variety of things, from high cholesterol and high blood pressure to social and psychological problems — and even cancer later on in life, according to the CDC.
Due to the great risk involved with childhood obesity, MUNCH is committing some of its resources to studying childhood food behavior. Luckily, MUNCH is next-door neighbors with the Child Development Lab, allowing researchers to look into childhood obesity. The children being studied have affectionately been dubbed “MUNCHkins.”
The “MUNCHkins” get the chance to help out in the children’s garden on campus, which makes them more willing to try new things.
“How many preschoolers do you know that enjoy kale?” Hardin said. “These kids do because they grew it in the garden and because the person who managed the garden says this is awesome.”
With all these state-of-the-art tools at their disposal and promising early results, MUNCH is free to dream big.
The scope and subject of future projects “is really up to the innovation and the creativity of my faculty,” Hardin said.
