An epidemic of overweight/obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardio-metabolic diseases is emerging at

planetary level, and healthy nutrition represents a critical help to counteract this trend. Unfortunately,

simplistic guidelines failed totally or partially, mainly because of THE COMPLEXITY AND HETEROGENEITY

OF NUTRITION/DIETARY HABITS IN HUMANS. EURODIET will tackle such complexity and the

urgent/unmet need of integrated studies by investigating how the COMBINATION of variables usually

analysed separately (ethnicity/geography, sex/gender, socio-economic status/education, previous dietary

habits, physical activity and smoking) affects adoption of healthy dietary habits and conventional as well as

novel metabolic and inflammatory biomarkers in a large number of subjects spanning from 50 to 79 years of

age. This approach is feasible being EURODIET a multidisciplinary consortium having access to existing

datasets/biological samples of large European projects SHARE and NU-AGE and will: i) integrate existing

cohorts and collect new ad hoc data (e.g. omics-based biomarker identification) on these samples; ii) based

on existing data collected at two time points within the NU-AGE project, perform a follow-up study on dietary

habits, health status and incident diseases on a subsample of subjects, iii) perform two proof-of-concept

randomized controlled trials to assess the effects of adherence to a healthy a whole-diet approach in adults

with and without metabolic disease; iv) determine facilitators and barriers for adherence to healthy dietary

patterns; v) bridge the gap between academic research, public health practice and the food production

industry; vi) provide state-of-the-art training to young scientists focusing on the importance of

addressing/combining biological and non-biological variables in dietary interventions and metabolic diseases.