INTERVIEW WITH YOLANDA SANZ

Graduate and Doctor of Pharmacy, with Extraordinary Prize, by the University of Valencia, she performed her postdoc at the University of Groningen. Other centres in which she had stays include the Institute of Food Research, the INRA, the University of Verona, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the McMaster University. As a Research Professor, she leads the Research Group on “Nutrition, Health and Microbial Ecology” at the IATA-CSIC. She was Associate Professor of the Degree of Human Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Valencia and she participates in specialisation courses, including Masters degrees at the University of Valencia, University of Seville, Università Politecnica delle Marche and the postgraduate courses of the European Association for Gastroenterology, Endoscopy and Nutrition. Member of the Panel on Nutrition, Dietetic Products and Allergies of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), she is also currently a member of the group “Guidance Review” of the Committee of Science and Emerging Risks of the EFSA and co-chair of the Nutrition and Health workgroup of the European Platform “Food for Life”. Furthermore, for years she has participated in diverse evaluation committees for research projects and plans (MINECO, ANEP, European Research Council Executive Agency; Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research; Medical Research Council UK, etc.).

The specific call is about sweeteners and sweetness enhancers, included in the last call of H2020 for project applications. I will meet with the main partners, although we are still creating the committee. The main idea of the proposal is to rigorously study the possible effect of the use of sweeteners on the total energy intake and, consequently, on obesity, and its safety. Currently, there is controversy on whether these help to control body weight or, on the contrary, they do not have this positive effect and they even increase calorie intake. Moreover, despite the evaluations published by the EFSA, its safety at the long-term is still questioned, especially due to the amounts consumed (increasingly higher) and the introduction of new sweeteners in the market with much less known effects. With regard to their possible impact on the intestinal microbiota, which is my research field, nowadays there is only one study published on the topic, which by the way has raised the social alarm. Thereby, it is logical that the Commission had decided to fund this topic and thus produce more scientific evidence.

Yes, this is the first time I come to the CSIC Office at Brussels. I think that both the location and the facilities are excellent and I´m thinking that we might hold the next meeting of the “MyNewGut” project here.

Through the “MyNewGut” project, we want to find out what components and functions of the intestinal microbiota we can regulate through diet and how to do this, in order to reduce the obesity index and metabolic pathologies associated with obesity, such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc. Likewise, we study aspects related to stress and alteration of eating behaviours, anxiety, etc. For this purpose, we are conducting epidemiological and human-based studies, both at the first stages of life and at the adult stage, from a multidisciplinary approach that combines the new Omic technologies (such as metagenomics) with physiological and clinical parameters of well-established validity.

The secret is to have good partners who are committed to the project and make their activities truly complementary. As for the previous work of creating the committee, it is very important to do it slowly and thoroughly, basing the decisions on scientific quality, international repercussion and the complementarity of the members. Then, the work consists in enhancing their value and visibility inside and outside of the committee, and foster collaborations. With respect to whether the ways of working are very different, I would say that there are always differences in the way to approach the same scientific problem from different scientific-technical areas (like the ones the members of our committee belong to), but this is also what helps us to be more creative and to carry out a work of greater quality and social impact, because it forces us to reconcile our perceptions of the problem.

I am a member of this panel of the EFSA since the year 2009. The panel has twenty members and our mission is to tackle issues of human nutrition. We perform scientific evaluations of products that are regulated in the European Union, such as the declarations of healthy properties of food products (“health claims”) and the safety of “new food products”, which are those that have not been consumed in the EU, substantially, before May 1997. We also handle other food issues such as allergens and their labelling, children´s formulas, etc. Now we are going to have a lot of work with the food products from third countries, since there is a new regulation that allows a less thorough evaluation than that of “new food products” if it can be demonstrated that the product has been consumed safely in other non-European countries for 25 years.

I remember now an initiative from the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom that I found specially interesting. They wanted to develop a new strategic research plan, for which they invited experts from around the world. They organised meetings for a whole year in which they debated together, both the evaluators and representatives of the funding institutions and researchers of two scientific areas, Nutrition and Health, which sometimes compete with each other, as happens in Spain.
In my opinion, it was a very interactive and productive strategy that favoured the identification of strengths and points of reconciliation between the two scientific areas, and it allowed the generation of new ideas and strategies, considering both the peculiarity of their own research system and the ideas provided by experts from other countries in an open debate. In the CSIC, the evaluation of strategic plans is conducted also by external evaluators and some foreigners, but an open and interactive debate with the researchers has never been proposed. This would make it easier to evaluate and plan the future between all the parts. Definitely, and with no doubts, direct discussion is still the best tool for good work and mutual understanding.

At the moment, the relationship between the microbiota and our health condition. The biodiversity of our intestinal microbiota is huge and has a great potential in the fields of nutrition and medicine, and the environment with which it interacts. In the future, the studies we are carrying out in this area will allow us to design more effective dietetic strategies to fight obesity or anxiety, and discover new antibiotics, molecules or biomarkers to be used in diagnostics.