Welcome to the Institute for Connecting Nutrition and Health (ICON-Health)!
This is an exciting time for everyone invested in nutrition, whether your interests are in health, research, scientific discovery, technology innovation, public policy, or if you eat food, you are an #ICON4Health.
Florida State University is uniquely positioned to be a national leader in addressing the connection between what we eat and our health – FSU is the first institution to embrace this objective: a university-wide, multidisciplinary priority. We are emboldened by the university’s vision, and our personal mission, to optimize human health. In doing so, we will also improve the economic burden that our healthcare industry faces.
At ICON-Health, we focus on nutrition as a cross-cutting, multidimensional set of challenges and opportunities for faculty to advance their research, to discover new knowledge and to advance the public good. Food and nutrition research is comprehensive in its academic reach, covering all levels of biological organization—from molecules to cells to organs to organisms to societies. Nutrition research spans across the fundamental and applied sciences and informs clinical practice and public health policies. Nutrition truly integrates across this translational spectrum like few other areas.
While nutrition is itself a discipline, it also represents a series of challenging research questions that are best addressed through cross-disciplinary, team-science approaches. All scientific disciplines- physical, biological, engineering, medical, and social sciences - have made important contributions to advancing our knowledge of the connections between food, diets, nutrition and health. Yet, there are enormous gaps in our fundamental understanding of nutrition as well as the scientific evidence base needed to realize the full potential of food and nutrition in improving health. These gaps include a deep understanding of interindividual variability in the diet–health relationship to setting guidelines, policies and practices that empower everyone to adopt dietary behaviors that improve health.
We invite all to become members of ICON-Health and engage with us around shared interests: #ICON4Health.