The Outlook on Active Nutrition Preview: Conversation with Sara Campbell

This article has been updated to include a transcription of the video.

Nutritional Outlook's managing editor, Sebastian Krawiec, interviews Sara Campbell, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Rutgers University. Campbell will be presenting about brain health as it relates to the microbiome and exercise performance at Nutritional Outlook's upcoming conference, The Outlook on Active Nutrition. In this interview, she talks about her research journey from from exercise science to studying the gut microbiome, plus what she is excited to learn from other speakers at the conference.

To learn more and register for the conference, click here.

Transcription:

Sebastian Krawiec: Hi everyone. I'm Sebastian Krawiec, managing editor of Nutritional Outlook. I am joined now by Sara Campbell, who is an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Rutgers University. Sarah will be speaking at our upcoming conference, The Outlook on Active Nutrition, and we very much look forward to her presentation. Thank you so much for joining us, Sarah.

Sara Campbell: Thank you, Sebastian, it is a pleasure to join you.

Krawiec: So I guess to start, I'd like to give you an opportunity to talk about yourself, your professional background, the research that you focus on.

Campbell: Great. Thank you. I started way back when with an undergraduate in exercise science and biology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, where I also played soccer. So that was a fantastic experience. And I met an amazing mentor who I decided to stay on with and complete a master's degree. From there, I engaged in an internship between my master's degree my Ph at the US Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, where I got to work with a number of Olympic teams, but predominantly was assigned to the US women's ice hockey team, which was an incredible experience. After that, I traveled down to Tallahassee, Florida, where I attended Florida State University and obtained a PhD in Movement Science, as it's called, down there, and my major focus there was actually lipid metabolism, enzymes of lipid transport, cholesterol metabolism. And so I completed my dissertation looking at how many calories you knew to expend to best optimize the lipid profile and enzymes of lipid transport. I then actually stayed on at Florida State to complete a post doctoral fellowship, but our department was Food Nutrition and Exercise Science, so my post doctoral fellowship was in nutrition and supported through the US Department of Agriculture to look at flax seed, so, dense in omega-3s, mucilage lignans, on how that might impact atherosclerotic lesions in an animal model of postmenopausal health. So I felt really lucky to get this combination of both exercise and nutrition in both human and animal models, to really fully embrace a translational aspect to understanding exercise and nutrition.

From there, I accepted a job in 2010 at Rutgers University and changed lumens, as I say. I wasn't looking anymore at the arterial lumen, but moved into the gut lumen, and had some conversations with folks trying to help figure out what my direction was. And I sat down at a computer and ran a PubMed search on exercise and microbiome, and zero results came back back then. So I decided, well, if there's nothing out there, I might as well begin contributing to it. So, long story short, that's where we started in 2010, 2011 and we haven't looked back since, and we've been proactively investigating the impacts of diet and exercise on the gut microbiota, with specific emphasis on sex differences.

Krawiec: Fascinating. And also the session we'll be speaking on is devoted to brain health. Obviously, your specialty is the microbiome. I wonder if you can talk about what you'd like to get into in your presentation as it relates to the microbiome, as it relates to its impacts on brain health, and what that can mean for exercise performance?

Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. Well, there is a direct connection between the brain and the gut through the vagus nerve. So this has now become lovingly referred to as the gut brain axis. So there are several metabolites that are generated and excreted by the gut microbiota that can cross the blood brain barrier and have impacts on brain health in a variety of fashions, ranging from things like anxiety and depression, across to aspects related to maybe aging related diseases, and how these microbial metabolites may be involved in that, whether or not there's a beneficial microbiome or even a pathogenic microbiome. So that becomes really important.

Exercise does very unique things to the gut microbiota. And so with that, we can begin to couple how exercise might manipulate the gut microbiota to produce these microbes that then release microbial derived metabolites that can influence brain health. So it'll be a real treat to explore those mechanisms and ways to be impactful with that gut brain axis.

Krawiec: Very cool. I wonder what you're looking to learn at The Outlook on Active Nutrition. I'm not sure if you had a chance to look at the agenda, but anything that caught your eye that you're looking forward to learning more about?

Campbell: You know, I think as a scientist, we just are like sponges, and so we enjoy absorbing information, particularly not in my area. I think one of the biggest reasons is that being in academics, not only are you primarily involved in research, but I teach sport nutrition, nutrition, exercise physiology classes to sometimes up to 200 students who have a wide variety of questions that range from what are some of the newest supplements that are out there, and how do they impact performance, to is lifting good for cardiovascular health, and in which ways is it good for cardiovascular health? So I think just absorbing information from the other speakers there is going to be extraordinarily beneficial, not just in the way it reforms maybe some hypotheses and perspectives from my research agenda, but in that way to help educate my students and foster those excitements within our future scientists and our future professionals.

Krawiec: Excellent. I wonder what interests or excites you about the dietary supplement and sports nutrition space currently?

Campbell: Yeah, that's a great question. For one, I think it's a very popular space. I think that many individuals, not just in our field and in academics, but I think folks across the realm of lay people, for lack of a better word, have an interest in trying to understand ways to help themselves. And they might not always do it through food, or have time to do it through food, so they look for ways to help augment their nutrition through supplements and/or ergogenic aids, that that might be beneficial. So I think that that's a real benefit.

I think there's also sometimes misinformation out there, so getting out the accurate information, scientifically backed information, is going to be really important to help educate the consumers, because it's a big industry, and there's always a lot of excitement generated around these topics. And having been in the field for so many years, we get asked about them a lot, and so that interest is surely there among the general population, including then us as researchers who help to answer some of these questions, to help that population.

Krawiec: Excellent. Thank you so much and very much. Look forward to your presentation.

Campbell: Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Krawiec: Cheers.