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Arno Wegkamp
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- food ingredients
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- health
A passion for food
I think that most people have a passion for food. "Only because it is essential for survival", you could agrue. "True", I will probably say. Still, I believe for some people this passion transcends the mere fact of eating food. For me, my passion extends to: cooking, adjusting my diet to stay physically fit, but it also reflects to knowing what is in food. For the layman, food is just food but for me it reflects a way of enriching myself physically and mentally. I feel that with this knowledge and passion I can help customers in improving their product to make food products healthier and more nutritious.
At NIZO food research I am involved in managing projects. But, before I continue explaining what I am involved in at NIZO I tell you something about myself. I have many hobbies (see photo's at the end of the text), but the common denominator in all these hobbies is learning and exploring my skills. Two hobbies I perform passionately are golf and fitness. In playing golf, the complex coordination in the very complicated swing is combined with extreme concentration skills, the constant learning and adjusting is what makes me thrive. In fitness, the muscle contractions don’t give you results if you neglect proper eating, much resting and self motivation. In fact, when reanalyzing the latter examples I feel that one important facet is unmentioned; integrating different aspect into a single goal. The integration of different aspect into projects is also one of our strongholds at NIZO.
During my PhD I was involved in modulating vitamin productions level in lactic acid bacteria. By the combined use of transcriptomics, metabolomics, genomics and metabolic modeling we were able to modulate folate (vitamin B11) levels more than a million fold. Much of the latter work was performed on synthetic media. In a later project many of the fermentation experiments were repeated on food matrices such as milk and fruit juices. During my postdoc I has involved in making mathematical model to understand complex interaction between bacteria and eukaryotes in complex ecosystems. All these learned skill, I currently using in many of the contract research projects at NIZO food research.
If you are interested in sharing my and NIZO's passion for food, please contact me.
Arno Wegkamp
Diving 
Beeing distinctive
Cooking
Playing golf