University of Giessen: Scientific evidence linking nutrition, mitochondria, and healthy aging
17 Feb 2026 | University of Giessen
Professor Gunter Eckert at the German University of Giessen explores the grey zone between food and pharmaceuticals and the regulatory challenges of communicating nutrition science. He says there is strong evidence for the Mediterranean diet’s benefits in supporting mitochondrial health and reducing the risk of neurodegeneration. Eckert discusses emerging tools to assess mitochondrial function at the individual level, highlighting the potential of personalized nutrition, while stressing that preventive strategies should prioritize diet and lifestyle.
This is Yolande von Hau from Nutrition Insight.
I'm here with Professor Gunter Eckert from the University of Gissen in Germany, and we're here today at the launch of the Future for Nutrition and Longevity Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, and I'd love to ask you a couple of questions.
We already saw you, of course, in an extensive panel discussion, but I had some more insight questions.
I understand that you work in a gray zone between food and pharmaceuticals, and I'm really curious how regulators, scientists, or industry, how can they navigate this space, these different areas.
Yeah, we have some borders here.
The main border are the health claims regulations, and so that is very important also for the food industry.
Because we work a lot in the lab and discover a lot of good things for foodstuff, but no one is allowed to talk about it, only when you get some health claim for it, and it's very, very tough to get a health claim by EFSA, and this is really a hurdle.
So maybe that would be something for the future to maybe adjust that a little bit to tell the audience that the results are not already based on clinical studies, but that there's some kind of evidence like that I think that is something I think we have to go because.
It's too hard to communicate any good news from the scientific side.
Interesting.
I understand also that you work with mitochondrial and cellular health, which we cover also more and more central themes in aging and disease prevention.
Are there any nutritional interventions that you just mentioned that health claims is an issue, but for which is there the most compelling evidence in terms of nutrition?
I talked about the health claims which are important for Nutritional compounds, single compounds, but the most evidence we have for diets.
So if you go on the food level or diet level, I can mention the Mediterranean diet, which is really proved to be healthy and good for healthy aging.
And also it protects, and that is proven by many meta analysis.
It protects from neurodegenerative diseases, a field where I came from, and when we applied components from the Mediterranean diet like polyphenols or omega 3 fatty acids to our model organisms.
We see that they really interfere with mechanisms that are related to aging processes, but also to processes that lead to neurodegeneration, and in a few points they are the mitochondria.
We saw with aging a decrease in mitochondrial function, and this leads to the so-called mitochondrial dysfunction.
And if you look for models in neurodegeneration, for instance for Alzheimer's disease, you see a much faster process in this degeneration of mitochondria, and with the mitochondria of dysfunction connected.
Is enhancement of oxidative stress.
You have more reactive oxygen species, and these bad guys are really responsible for the damages in the cell, especially the cell membrane and the nucleus.
So to make a long story short, it's really the combination of food and food components.
Also we look for single components because you can't apply a whole meal, for instance, for a cell culture experiment and so on, but on the human human level we have to think about.
The diet and not only single components and balance it out it out.
That's a fact.
You can't balance unhealthy diet to include some good supplements, you know, and people who take the best supplements are most protected.
Why?
Not because of the supplements, because they follow a healthy lifestyle before, because they think about their physiology and how they can provide a healthy lifestyle.
And then the supplements came on top.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And I'm also curious if we talk about diets, lifestyle.
Another side is precision nutrition or personalized nutrition.
Do you see what kind of role do you see for that in targeting cellular mitochondrial health at an individual level, so for per person?
Yeah, I think at this we're just at the beginning.
So we also work in human studies with peripheral blood cells, isolate them, and measure mitochondrial activity, and we can determine from our data, we can determine the bioenergetic health level.
So we can really on an individual level can assess mitochondrial function and this might be a way really to to.
Suggest for people to follow a healthy nutritional way or a special supplement to improve mitochondrial function.
One example for this is we had just a clinical.
Try with orange juice and the students, almost as the participants were always recruited from our students, and they had to drink 200 mL or a small glass of orange juice every day for 4 weeks.
And we had a placebo group with the same vitamin C, with the same glucose level in the drink, and after the 4 weeks we saw really tremendous changes in mitochondrial function.
So they had more ATP in their mononuclear blood cells, and the respiration of the mitochondria improves and also different mitochondrial complex activities were improved by one glass of orange juice per day.
And also we looked for the immune function of these cells and also after stimulation we saw an improvement.
So it's very easy, you see, it's very easy to drink one glass of orange juice per day.
Maybe you improve your mitochondrial activity in these very important immune cells.
Saying this that we just published a paper where we show that aged people over 65 have significantly less mitochondrial function compared to young cells from young people, and we included people with MCI with mild cognitive impairment, which is believed to be.
Pre-Alzheimer's condition, so that a lot of people who have MCI, they also developed Alzheimer's disease and what we saw is that if you compare the age, the cells from the aged people with the cells from the MCI people, we have again a significant drop, so.
We have to test it in further studies, but if you see that the young people drinking only one glass of orange juice improve this, maybe the aged people or even people with MCI may benefit from a very simple approach.
So that is something we have to find funding for future studies, but this is very.
It was very very we were very happy about this results.
Yeah, very interesting, and I'm also curious, covering a little bit of what you were talking about earlier, because of course that's nutrition, that's foods and all that, how does that compare to pharmaceuticals when we talk about preventing or delaying the onset of certain kinds of neurodegenerative diseases?
What's the role for nutrition?
What's the role for pharmaceuticals in your in your mind?
By definition, you can't, you can't start medical therapy without diagnosis, right?
Because that's the difference between food and medicine.
With medicine you have a risk benefit ratio, and it could be that you have a kind of risk to take medication, but you have a bigger chance for a benefit in a situation of disease.
This is not acceptable for for healthy people.
But I think in the future we have to be more, more liberal and maybe also like the Americans, they see that aging is a treatable disease in Europe, especially in Germany.
We don't agree with that.
So I don't want to, I don't want to offer to introduce medications to healthy people, but maybe in some conditions where you really have science, think about pre-diabetes.
You know that people with HbAC1 level goes up, glucose levels go up, so at a different point, they are pre-diabetes, so they're not ill, but they're on the way.
And then when they when they when they passed this border, then they're diagnosed as type 2 diabetes, and then they get the full pharmacological treatment, so maybe it would be wise to get earlier into this treatment, but.
We always should try at first lifestyle factors of course or to combine this also later, not to say that now I have a pharmacological treatment, I'm fine, so we should also see that.
Patients also follow the habits for physical activities and also for a healthy diet as , so it would be more a continuum between, between healthy and diseased.
Interesting.
And one final question that I have, and I'm sure there are loads because I'm just curious, are there any evidence gaps that you think need to be filled to make nutrition like a bigger part in this in these kinds of strategies to help prevent their online these kinds of diseases?
Is there something that you think, if we have that, if we have that evidence that would help?
It would be a dream that we have more clinical evidence for preventive approaches, but the problem is that when we work with humans, so we have long observation times.
So for us it's very easy to work with sea elephants.
The worm also only lives.
30 days, so it's very easy to see over the lifespan of this worm if you are successful with your intervention or not.
With humans it's very hard to tell, but anyway, I think we have to invest more.
Efforts, meaning money, of course as.
Yeah, OK, interesting.
Thank you so much.
