A balanced diet and enough sleep and exercise will help strengthen your immune system.

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.

How is the soil microbiome related to the nutritional value of the crop onion?

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 FoodWays team got to explore the edible plants in a nearby park, and collected the first plants for the nutritional analyses. This will help uncover the potential of these plants for the diets of early hominins.

Autism, Alzheimer’s, and bipolar disorder: can the development of these mental health conditions be influenced by the ketogenic diet? Increasingly, research suggests it might. 'For those it helps, it can be life-changing,' says neuroscientist Eline Dekeyster.

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…

Which consumer groups post the greatest cost to public health and the planet through their food choices, and how can we use this fine-scale information to accelerate a sustainable dietary transition?

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…

Around 1.8 million years ago, early hominins moved into Eurasia and adapted to colder climates and unfamiliar ecosystems. This project investigates whether innovations in diet such as eating new plants or applying new techniques for food processing (cooking or fermentation) contributed to this major…

Steering soil microbiomes for better crop quality: the holy grail to improve human health?

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.

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.

Although the world has made tremendous progress in health, education, sanitation and hygiene, global public health challenges still exist. Disparities in health exist between and within nations as evidenced by inequalities in disease burden, mortality, nutrition and environmental well-being. How does…

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

This project explores how changes in diet helped early hominins expand from Africa into the colder and more seasonal environments of Europe.

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.

Promotores: G. Persoon, R. Schefold

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

PhD defence

PhD defence

Our scientists working with laboratory animals undergo training on animal experiments. In this training, researchers learn how to handle laboratory animals responsibly. Read more about the requirements we set for researchers working with laboratory animals.

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

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

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

Most degree programmes at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences are based in the Pieter de la Court building on the Wassenaarseweg in Leiden. Besides this location, some degree programmes are based in The Hague, at Campus The Hague’s Wijnhaven building.

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.

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.

best phd theses of the faculty of science Leiden - physics, chemistry, computer science, biopharmaceutical sciences, biology, industrial ecology, environmental sciences, astronomy, mathematics. thesis

Master Health, Ageing and Society: tackle ageing population, innovating and improving elderly care, care for ageing population, health systems, wellbeing & policy. Prepare for future healthcare and societal challenges.

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…

Could ketogenic therapy change the future of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) treatment? Bret Scher sits down with Eline Dekeyster to explore how nutritional ketosis may support individuals with autism and other brain-based conditions.

More CO2 in the atmosphere is making food crops more calorific, less nutritious and potentially more toxic.

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.

CML researcher Sterre Ter Haar has made the front page of The Washington Post with her research into declining nutritional values. ‘We hope this is a piece of the puzzle that says: perhaps we should take this seriously and find out what is happening to our food.’

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.

Micro- and nanoplastics cause stress to crops such as lettuce and carrots, PhD candidate Laura Julia Zantis found. This can lead to reduced growth and a lower nutritional value. Biodegradable plastics have this effect too, likely because of chemicals they release during degradation.

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…

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