SOAR is a research school. In addition to the focus on PhD students, SOAR also includes graduates, postdocs and supervisors in the activities and networks. This is important because they also constitute the research environment, in which the PhD student is under education. SOAR wants to contribute to the professional discussions with a special focus on the organic food and farming systems.
The research interests of SOAR cover a wide range of subjects within organic agriculture and food systems:
The overall scope of the project is to explain how differences in the production systems potentially can lead to foods with difference in a health beneficial composition of bioactive components.
The project is performed to improve fundamental knowledge of organically grown foods in order to further document their quality in relation to agricultural practice. This will be realised in the present project by investigating the influence of a variety of rigidly controlled cultivation methods on immunological measurements and health biomarkers of animals. The results will be explained accordingly to the data on content of nutrients and bioactive constituents of the ingredients.
The main focus will be devoted to the immune responses with special emphasis on the development of an animal model for studying the immune response after an oral challenge.
Background
Trace elements, bioactive secondary metabolites and vitamins are among the most important quality markers in plants. Yet, very little information is available on their content, bioavailability and health effects. In an ongoing project funded by DARCOF-III, the main objective is to study the impact of different agricultural systems relevant for organic farming on the ability of cereal and vegetable crops to absorb trace elements from the soil and to synthesise bioactive compounds with health promoting effects.
In a recent study (Lauridsen et al., 2008) a rat-feeding experiment was performed, comparing the effect of three iso-energetic and iso-nitrogeneos diets composed of vegetables and a high content of rapeseed oil, produced accordingly to each of three cultivation systems on a range of physiological responses. Some notable differences appeared with regard to some of the measured health biomarkers (daytime activity, IgG, volume of adipose tissue, liver metabolic function and liver lipid peroxidation). It was further recommended in the paper, that in future studies designed to take the variability of cultivation systems used for conventional and organic growing into consideration, focus should be on directed on these health biomarkers.
