Heading up the initiative, takes Professor Gibney full circle in a career that began in University College Dublin and has seen him become an internationally renowned and respected figure in nutrition.
It all started with a primary degree in agriculture at UCD's Glasnevin site at Albert College, followed by a Masters in agricultural chemistry. From there, Gibney crossed the globe to the University of Sydney where he taught in the veterinary school and earned his PhD on the digestive physiology of newborn lambs.
Institute’s website in summer 2009
Soon after coming home, he moved from agriculture into human nutrition, working at Southampton University and Trinity College Dublin, and he moved to UCD in 2006. "It has been a great fit," says Professor Gibney, explaining how food and health research in UCD had grown since his days as a student.
"If you look at it historically, when I was here in the late 1960s and early 1970s, UCD was absolutely focused on agriculture. It was primary production, it was farming. There was forestry and horticulture there too, but it was largely about output," he says.
chain together under the umbrella of the UCD Institute of Food and Health, consolidating the seven academic "pillars" of food safety, production, regulation, nutrition, science, biosystems and consumer issues.
Then in the 1980s, the food science element started to develop. "Now the emphasis was on not only how many pigs and chickens you could rear but what happened in food processing," explains Gibney. He watched with interest as UCD made appointments around the turn of the century that brought food and health together.
"Cecily Kelleher was appointed as professor of public health medicine [and epidemiology], Pat Wall was appointed to her area and Séamus Fanning was appointed professor of food safety," he notes. "Then there were lectureships, including my daughter Eileen, who was appointed a lecturer in nutrigenomics."
So when University College Dublin started a thematic recruitment scheme in 2006, Gibney took the opportunity and became professor of food and health in the UCD School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine.
"I saw that this would be a very attractive thing for me to do," he recalls. "I thought a change would be good and I can come to UCD and go from farm to fork, the whole food chain, and that's fantastic for me."
Now Professor Gibney has brought that research chain together under the umbrella of the UCD Institute of Food and Health, consolidating the seven academic "pillars" of food safety, production, regulation, nutrition, science, biosystems and consumer issues.
The Institute aims to promote food and health within UCD, on a national level and in the international community, notes Gibney, describing how the new Institute is benchmarked against world-leading research at the University of Reading, the Technical University of Munich and the University of California, Davis.
Current areas include analysing food intake in Ireland, understanding how consumers perceive food risk, teasing out the interactions between food and genes, developing functional foods for the future and a collaboration with the UCD Earth Systems Institute to log the carbon footprint of the Irish diet.
Irish waistlines are expanding
It's estimated that a quarter of adults in Ireland are now obese. That's undoubtedly spurred on by an increasingly "obesogenic" environment, where cheap and available food combines with a sedentary lifestyle to pile on the pounds. But how can we tackle that trend? In part by addressing the built environment, according to Professor Gibney, Director of the UCD Institute of Food and Health.
"We are looking at the built environment to see how physical activity and obesity are linked to the way we design buildings," he says.
"If you have obese people that go from five to 75, if you were to stop obesity in the morning it would take 70 years for those five-year-olds to die off. Now if in fact obesity is not being cut off then it follows that you are going to have obesity for 100 years. So if you were going to design a school or office, would you not say how do we incorporate aspects of a built environment that are useful."
"I should be able to press a button and bring a desk up so that at least I stand. There should be simple things I can do in an office environment to improve physical activity. We have a meeting bicycle – eight people sit on it, they all pedal, one person steers and has the brakes. We don't exactly have the climate for it but there's no reason why meetings can't be occasionally held outside."
"Physical activity is absolutely vital. Without physical activity we are all kidding ourselves."