Food science and clinical science join for the first time in a periodical publication

Springer is founding a new journal Food Digestion, dedicated to a quickly growing area of research - food science combined with the physiology of digestion. The journal will publish two issues in 2010 and increase to four issues in 2011.

Food Digestion will bring together the increasing number of researchers who are working at the interfaces between the physical sciences and nutrition and health. Rigorous, multidisciplinary science is required to understand the impact of food on diet, nutrition and human health and this new journal aims to fill that need. Food Digestion will publish original papers and reviews that describe interrelationships between foods and all aspects of the physiological, biophysical, microbial and neurohumoral components of digestion, acquisition and absorption, with particular emphasis on the role of food structure.

While the principle area of focus of the journal is in regard to human digestion, the journal will welcome papers that explore these areas in animal and in vitro models and which compare these processes in an evolutionary sense. Editors-in-chief Roger Lentle from the Institute of Food Nutrition and Human Health at Massey University in New Zealand and Peter Wilde from the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, UK, will work together with an international editorial board. Food Digestion will include features such as fast electronic publication in Online First-, Cross Reference Linking, and Alert services.

Susan Safren, Senior Editor, Food Science and Technology at Springer, said, "There is an increasing interest in determining the role of the physical and chemical properties of food on human health in terms of the resultant physiological response to that food. With no journal currently in place for this particular field, papers are published in a variety of periodicals focusing on either food science or clinical aspects. Our goal is to create a single publication where this information can be published, located, and reviewed."