Nutriz

Nutriz provides management and consultancy of human health science. Nutriz was founded by Dennis Zeilstra in 2014.

About the founder of Nutriz

Dennis Zeilstra has a master’s degree in Engineering ¹2005, University of Twente, The Netherlands, is trained in analytical thinking and adopted a pragmatic approach. He has worked as a R&D lead engineer in aerospace for 12 twelve years. He has been active in nutritional science since 2010, and switched from engineering to a full time job the field of probiotics and microbiome in 2018, where he was senior science analyst until 2022.

The challenge of interpreting scientific results

With hundreds of scientific articles on human health being published everyday, it can be challenging to make sense of the scientific insights. Nutriz uses epistemology and extensive experience with data analysis to answer scientific inquiries. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy of science that asks questions like ‘what is knowledge?‘, ‘how do we gain understanding?’, and ‘what can we know?‘. This is useful to, for example, assess whether or not there is a causal relationship between a certain intervention and an observed effect.

Dennis brings in extensive experience in data analysis, which helps to understand the pitfalls of over-interpretation of data. Having worked in physics for over 12 years, he has the benefit that he was actually able to validate data-based theories and models in very repeatable experiments. This is almost never possible in life sciences, and having experienced that even ‘simple’ physics models can be wrong, helps to be cautious with interpretations and to always look for the potential pitfalls. This competence increases the reliability of the science analyses conducted by Nutriz.

What can Nutriz do for you?

Questions about medical or health science come in all forms and shapes. Here are some examples where Nutriz can support you:

• If you work in the nutrition or food supplement industry and you are looking for new means to provide health benefits to the end user, Nutriz can help you to identify new indications for your products using a structured science analysis.
• Similarly, if you want to develop a new product for a specific health benefit, Nutriz can provide an overview of compounds (or e.g. probiotic strains) with evidence of an effect on that particular health target.
• Does your organisation conduct clinical studies (or work with others that conduct these for you)? Nutriz can help you to select the proper methodology for your particular research question.

Nutriz provides these services as consultancy projects or as a management service.

Overview of relevant activities and publications

• Management service for Microbiome Center with Dennis Zeilstra taking up the role of director for science and technology (2022).
• D. Zeilstra, ‘Wisselwerking tussen  schildklier en microbioom’, OrthoFyto, vol. 2022, nr. 2, pp. 22–27, 2 april 2022. https://www.orthofyto.com/of-focus/wisselwerking-tussen-schildklier-en-het-microbioom
• D. Zeilstra, J. A. Younes, R. J. Brummer, and M. Kleerebezem, “Perspective: Fundamental Limitations of the Randomized Controlled Trial Method in Nutritional Research: The Example of Probiotics,” Adv Nutr, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 561–571, Sep. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmy046
• Lecturing: part of the course Philosophy of Nutrition (2017)
• Publication: several mainly epistemically flavored web-articles on foodlog.nl (a leading Dutch platform for food professionals)
• Education: course on Orthomolecular Nutrition (2013-2014)
• Education: course on Basic Medical Knowledge (2011-2012)