On June 9-12, 2018, the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) 2018 Annual Meeting was held at the Haines Convention Center in Boston, USA. The theme of the conference was “Where the Best in Science &Health Meet”. Previous ASN annual meetings were held in conjunction with the other five science societies in April each year under the name of “Experimental Biology (EB)”. But this year, the ASN meeting was held for the first time independently, which showed the significance and role of the nutrition discipline have been highly valued as never before. This annual meeting attracted more than 3,800 representatives of international organizations, experts and scholars, business representatives and government workers from all over the world. The conference covers almost all of the cutting-edge topics of nutrition and human health, such as intestinal flora balance and obesity, nutrition and cancer prevention and treatment, and nutrition epidemiology.

    Professor Shen Lirong, Ph.D. student Chen Yong, undergraduate student Zhang Junmeng attended the meeting.

    The main research direction of Professor Shen Lirong's team is food nutrition. On the morning of June 10th, Chen Yong gave an oral presentation entitled “Dietary supplementation of curcumin to improve heart damage in mice caused by heat stress: physiological and molecular mechanisms” at the “Dietary Bioactive Ingredients and Cardiovascular Health” session.

    During the poster presentation, Professor Shen and the team members had an active exchange and discussion with many experts and representatives, and met many international collegues and Chinese experts, domestic representatives and a number of Zhejiang University alumni. Excellent graduates of our school -  alumni of the Harvard School of Public Health, Wang Fenglei, also attended the conference. The summary of the conference will be published online in 《Current Developments in Nutrition》.

During the meeting, Professor Shen Lirong gave a speech entitled “Hot spice on heat– curcumin and heat stress”. The report introduced to American experts that in recent years, the team used Chinese sturgeon, Drosophila and mice as model organisms to carry out the regulation and molecular mechanism of curcumin on nutrient imbalance. Curcumin has improved and reduced stress damage caused by high temperature stress. The progress of mortality and the development of molecular mechanisms are discussed, and plans for further collaborative research are discussed. Professor Odwars and Professor Lai Chaoqiang also listened to Professor Shen's briefing on the development of international standards for camellia oil,and plans to introduce the intervention of research on the intervention of high-risk patients with cardiovascular disease. Since Professor Shen returned from JM-USDA HNRCA in 2008, the experts have highly appraised the original research work aiming at functional food resources with Chinese characteristics and improving the health status of the Chinese people, and the achievements of close cooperation between the two sides and put forward a lot of forward-looking suggestions.