Professor Dolores O'Riordan:

I will respond to some of the questions Deputy Martin Kenny posed. One example of what we have done with plant growers to give them added value would be the growers of Irish herbs. Traditional Irish herbs, if they are leafy, have quite a short shelf life. We extracted compounds from them and put them into drinks that, for example, were of benefit to joint health. We have taken it from going to their site, growing them to make sure that they were grown in the proper conditions to maximise the benefits that we would get from the herb, and showing them how to extract it, how to make the drink and right through to a human trial to say the benefit this drink it will have to one's joint health. In another example, we worked with a mushroom company developing the technology to enhance the vitamin D level. It is an issue, in particular, for Irish people. Across northern Europe, we find it difficult to get enough vitamin D. There are many health benefits, if we could increase the amount of vitamin D. With the technology, we increase the amount of vitamin D, and work right through to human trial to show that those who consumed the mushrooms produced under these certain conditions had higher vitamin D levels. That allowed them to sell at a higher price into the retailers. Retailers in that case were willing to pay a premium for these products. We also have examples of work extracting glucans from seaweed that is found all along the west coast and using it as an animal feed to show that the animals had enhanced immunity and required fewer antibiotics. Indeed, we are now transferring that into the human chain as well to enhance the immune system. Those are merely some examples of what we do.

Deputy Martin Kenny's questions around branding are relevant. It is fantastic what is being done with Kerrygold. At present, we are four years into a project to see whether there are specific benefits in Irish cheese because the milk is coming from a grass-fed regime that is not available in many places around the world. We are working with companies to see can we get a unique selling point for Irish cheese. It would be taking it from working at producer level right through to looking at the nutrient content and the health benefits. It feeds in to the public health element about which Senator Mulherin spoke. We had quite a lot of publicity last year showing that while many people perceive full-fat cheese as having a negative effect on benefits, we were able to show the opposite. In fact, it was decreasing cholesterol and not affecting weight gain even when people were consuming what would be considered quite high amounts of cheese.

There is another niche area that our work would tie into. There has been much mention of sheep in the west of Ireland and a couple of our colleagues within agriculture and food look at differentiating, particularly Irish meat. For example, they were able to take lamb that was reared in Connemara and compare it with lamb from other parts of Ireland, and, indeed, other parts of the world, and show that it is quite different and that one can differentiate it from other products, and then to see whether there are taste benefits coming from that lamb compared with any other. Consequently, one would be able to brand it as, for example, a Connemara lamb with a special taste and perhaps a special nutrient profile. That type of work, based on provenance, traceability and authenticity, is a big element of what we do.

To pick up on the malnutrition piece, I suppose over-nutrition is possibly a bigger problem than under-nutrition. Our work programme takes on two sides of that. One is looking at it very much at a molecular level because some people become obese and stay relatively healthy whereas other people quite quickly develop inflammatory conditions, such as type 2 diabetes. We have work trying to understand why one person is more predisposed towards obesity and the other risk factors associated with it.

We also work from a public health campaign perspective. As a university, we play an important role within Healthy Ireland and are involved in the initiatives. It is a big challenge in trying to change consumer behaviour. We have moved to foods that we like for that very reason - because we like them. We tend to like foods that are high in salt, high in sugar and high in fat. Consumer behaviour, particularly from our school of public health, is an area of key concern to us.