In memoriam of Nils-Georg Asp

W e remember our valued colleague and friend, Nils-Georg Asp, professor emeritus in Applied Nutrition at Lund University and the former executive director of the Swedish Nutrition Foundation, with deep affection. Nils-Georg died on June 1, 2012, after a long brave fight against cancer. He is deeply missed by his wife Marianne, his four daughters and their families, as well as by many colleagues and researchers in the field of food science and nutrition. Education Nils-Georg Asp was born in Svedala in southern Sweden and began his medical studies at Lund University in 1963. During his PhD studies, he joined the group led by Arne Dahlqvist, in which lactase was characterized in detail and separated from other small intestinal b-galactosidases. By improving the enzymatic methods and introducing new biochemical techniques, he succeeded in characterizing and monitoring three different intestinal b-galactosidases in the human small intestine. Nils-Georg defended his PhD thesis in medical chemistry in 1971 (1). His enzymatic work was combined with experimental and clinical studies on human biopsies and contributed to better diagnostic tools of chronic diseases and food intolerances in the gastrointestinal tract, and this research has been important to many other researchers in the field. It also paved the way for the next step in Nils-Georg's career. Research As a qualified physician and Associate Professor in medical and physiological chemistry with specialist competence in clinical nutrition, Nils-Georg started to conduct his postdoc research at the department belonged to both the faculties of Medicine and Engineering, implying teaching of nutrition for both future physicians and engineers, and was led by his former supervisor, Professor Arne Dahlqvist. Together they became pioneers in this new research area at Lund University. By now, nutrition was established as an academic discipline in Sweden and four professor chairs were created with different profiles: Global Nutrition At the beginning of the 1970s, protein-energy malnutrition was common in developing countries (third world). To prevent and reduce famine and undernourishment, the food industry in the more developed countries began to produce infant formulas and gruels based on powdered milk and/or grains or blends thereof. Milk and cereals are cheap and good sources of proteins and carbohydrates. As was already known at that time, reducing sugars and amino groups from proteins and amino acids could cause a reaction (the so-called Maillard reaction), and produce an array of Maillard reaction products (MRPs). These MRPs affect the food quality …