The growing occurrence of excessive weight gain in Western countries is associated with metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. This is due to combined genetic and environmental factors, among which nutrition plays a major role. In this context, obesity is associated with an array of patho-physiological disorders including altered lipid metabolism and inflammation. Dietary strategies can be successful in alleviating such metabolic disorders. Moreover, consumers are more than ever willing to consume “good food” regarding both pleasure and health promotion. In this context, Polar Lipids (PL) are important dietary microcomponents widely used in the food industry for emulsification, foaming and formulation, providing pleasant texture properties to food products. Soybean and egg lecithin are the main commercial sources of PL while milk polar lipids (MPL) are only seldom used. However, conversely to other sources, MPL present a unique polar lipid profile, rich in sphingolipids, and in mammalian milks, a unique natural structure under the form of Milk Fat Globule Membrane (MFGM) constituted of many bioactive polar lipids and proteins. These components can beneficially impact on lipid metabolism, in particular through (i) the ability of sphingolipids to lower cholesterol absorption and triacylglycerol hydrolysis previously demonstrated in mice and in vitro and (ii) the lower fatty acid content of polar lipid molecules compared with triacylglycerols. Buttermilk, a byproduct of the buttermaking industry that has been of low value up to date in human nutrition, is a major source of such MPL. The strategy of project VALOBAB will lay within the triangle of sustainable development to address the question of the feasibility of buttermilk value-adding through sustainable processing in order to provide a buttermilk microconstituent rich in MPL of functional value. The project will investigate the benefits of such buttermilk-derived fraction regarding (i) functional properties in different newly formulated dairy food products to lower triacylglycerol and/or other PL source intake while bringing appreciated sensory properties to consumers, and (ii) nutritional properties regarding lipid metabolism including cholesterol and triacylglycerol absorption but also inflammation, with the aim of slowing down metabolic diseases of nutritional origin. Thereby, VALOBAB project will help dairy industry to add value to buttermilk by taking into account its nutritional, biochemical and structural specificities and its ability to be processed in a sustainable manner.

AGRALID project involves a multidisciplinary team of 9 partners (INRA PEGASE, INRA URA and PEAT, INRA SAS, LARESS-ESA, LESMA-Audencia, Bleu Blanc Coeur, Valorex, Terrena, and CERNh Développement). The project focuses on developing a tool to help define the best dietary strategies that conciliate human health, animal welfare, agricultural biodiversity, and environmental impacts of food production. The project is centred on the consumer whose eating habits are quite pervasively present. The main objective of the project is to offer the consumer: 1/ A better access to more balanced food, especially regarding lipid content in products of animal origin with a focus on restoring a good balance between Omega 3 (n-3 FAs) and Omega 6 (n-6 FAs), diminishing saturated fatty acids, altogether with a better consideration of the environmental impact. 2/ An optimization guide for eating practices that will bring the consumer solutions, only slightly modifying his eating habits, to strike a good balance regarding the three dimensions: environment, nutrition and cost. Starting with defined weekly menus, representatives of the eating habits of the french population, the project will establish a database on the threedimensional impact (nutrition, environment and socio-economy) of the food items that constitute those menus. As it is extremely difficult to change consumer habits, the project focuses on food items quality, more specifically on food items of animal origin, as those are the most impacting on nutrition, environment and socio-economy. Thus, the project will propose and analyse diverses solutions to optimize agricultural products of animal origin, experimenting new feed sources and the acceptation by the producers of the agricultural practices associated. The three dimensional impact of those optimized food items will be measured and integrated in the database. Using multivariate statistics the project will position the original weekly menus, with or without optimized food items, with regard to soci-economic perception (consumer and producer point of view), nutritional quality and environmental impact. Using linear programming, the project will extend this analysis to other types of menus, thus developping a decision making tool or an optimization guide that will position diverse menus on three cursors: the environmental cursor, the nutritionnal cursor and the socio-economic cursor. This tool will not only address the consumer but also all other actors of the food chain: farmers; national authorities, actors of the food transformation industry; actors from the catering sector.

A major stake for agriculture is to significantly reduce pesticide applications while maintaining productivity. This will require significant technical but also organisational changes. In this context, the present project is proposed by a pool of research teams representing a large and complementary set of disciplines: epidemiology, agronomy, social sciences and mathematical sciences. Our central objective is to produce scenarios to allocate resistant varieties at the scale of a cultivated landscape. Such scenarios will allow limiting the development of diseases while ensuring the durability of the efficiency of the genetic resistances. The scenarios will be evaluated from the point of view of their organizational feasibility as well as their technical performances. The social representations of the disease by the actors will be considered in order to assess the scenarios’ acceptability. The GESTER project is based on the joint study of two main crop species: wheat and oil seed rape. It is structured as follows: (1) acquisition of knowledge on the strategies of the actors and development of multicriteria decision models; (2) acquisition of knowledge on the diseases and development of spatially explicit epidemiological models; (3) use of the models and acquired knowledge to produce "candidate" scenarios; (4) joint evaluation of these "candidate" scenarios by all partners to produce scenarios that are acceptable by the actors and efficient with regards to both biological and operational criteria; (5) a transversal task will be specifically dedicated to the methodological questions raised by modelling of epidemics on explicit landscapes. The diffusion of the results will be made in particular through the communication supports of the partner Technical Institutes (extension services).

Multicriteria assessment of agrifood systems is essential to improve sustainability of food value chains. To perform such assessment, collection and management of data on the whole range of agrifood system activities are of primary importance. There is a real need of tools to structure, store and share data related to the transformation of agricultural products into food, domain currently poorly documented. With this purpose, three different and complementary approaches have been developed by the largest research institute in agriculture, food and environment: MEANS platform, which provides tools and database for Life Cycle Assessment practitioners; BaGaTel database, structured by PO² ontology, which contains data about transformation processes and food products; @Web, which is a web application which allows the management of data tables using semantic web languages. The aim of DataSusFood project is to develop an interoperable system taking advantage of these different approaches to deliver open access data in accordance with FAIR principles. Developments of adequate software, modules, scripts for interoperability (WP1), data entry (WP2) and data accessibility (WP3) will be performed in close collaboration between computer scientists and users. Three use cases will support the project: production of cheese, industrial dairy protein powders and food packaging. Tools and open access data delivered by DataSusFood project will be highly valuable for scientists, technical institutes, industries and governmental agencies dealing with open access data issues and/or sustainability goals related to agrifood systems.