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Health issues & our core businesses
:: Danone’s mission — bringing health through food to as many people as possible — guides our teams every day. Their task is to offer tasty, balanced foods that deliver health benefi ts to a broad spectrum of consumers and address each country’s special public health needs.
Food to help build and preserve healthDanone’s mission covers a broad range of situations, linked to socio-economic trends as well as public health issues, both worldwide and local. For Danone brands, developing healthy foods is a major means of leveraging value creation, and we rely on the expertise of Danone’s R&D teams, working closely with stakeholders, to meet this challenge.
In 2010, Danone pursued its own R&D and partnered with prominent universities and scientific institutions, refining the make-up and nutritional value of our products and advancing food science in key areas: the genome of intestinal flora, also called microbiota; the role of microbes in health; and the links between hydration, health and well-being.
Every day, science shows that each of us has specific nutritional needs, which change as we move from infancy through childhood, adolescence and adulthood to old age, and also reflect our gender and physical condition — from pregnancy to aging, from metabolic deficiency to chronic illness. Danone explores this vast terrain by drawing on the complementary strengths of our four business lines, which span the nutritional needs of every generation.
First International Symposium Pasteur Institute/Danone Research
Last November the Pasteur Institute and Danone Research welcomed over 300 international researchers to the first international Microbes for Health symposium in Paris.
Participants discussed recent discoveries in the field of intestinal microbiota*, shedding new light on the role these bacteria play in human health. Key findings included the sheer size of the microbiota genome — 150 times larger than the human genome, with a thousand bacteria species and over 3.3 million genes — and its role in certain pathologies.
Researchers outlined preliminary explanations of the mechanisms underlying the health benefits of certain bacteria. In so doing, they opened new prospects for developing specific health foods with bacterial strains that foster the growth of beneficial bacteria within the microbiota.
* Microbiota: a diverse community of bacteria residing naturally in the human intestine, including lactobacilli, bacteroides, enterobacteria, etc.
