About

Dr. Hannah Holscher is the Director of the Nutrition and Human Microbiome Laboratory and a Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois. Her laboratory focuses on understanding the interplay of diet, the microbiome, and health and disease. As the lab director, she leads a team that includes graduate students, research staff, and undergraduate members, all working collaboratively to explore the complex relationships between nutrition and the human microbiome. Dr. Holscher's work aims to elucidate how dietary factors influence the microbiome and, in turn, impact human health outcomes.

Research topics

• Biology
• Food science
• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Endocrinology
• Computer Science
• Immunology
• Microbiology
• Environmental health
• Biotechnology
• Biochemistry
• Genetics
• Physiology

Selected publications

• Medically Tailored Meals During Radiotherapy for Head and Neck Cancer: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

  Nutrition and Cancer · 2026-01-16

  article

  = 7). Participants received isocaloric MTMs daily for two weeks pre-RT and during RT. CRHF meals contained ∼30%-carbohydrate, 45%-fat, and 25%-protein, compared with ∼50/30/20% in SD meals. Feasibility outcomes were recruitment, retention, adherence, acceptability, and adverse events. Exploratory outcomes included descriptive changes in weight and body composition to inform future trial design. Recruitment and retention rates were 65% and 69%, respectively. MTM adherence averaged 92% in CRHF and 96% in SD. Participants reported high MTM satisfaction. CRHF participants exhibited descriptive patterns suggesting greater muscle preservation and fat loss. Higher adherence to either diet was observed with less weight loss during RT. Feasibility data suggest that a "Food is Medicine" approach may warrant further investigation in a larger trial design to assess efficacy.

  PublisherDOI

• Oral Multienzyme Supplementation Alters Postprandial Plasma Nutrient Concentrations after a Mixed Meal in Healthy Middle-Aged and Older Adults: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Crossover Trial

  Journal of Nutrition · 2026-02-07

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Age-related decline in digestive function increases malnutrition risk. Supplementing meals with digestive enzymes may improve macronutrient digestion and bioavailability in adults reaching older ages. OBJECTIVES: To assess postprandial plasma nutrient concentrations after co-ingestion of a mixed meal and a mixture of 6 enzyme preparations (ENZ), including proteases, lipase, amylase, and glucoamylase. METHODS: Thirty middle-aged and older adults (56 ± 11 y; 18 females, 12 males) ingested chicken, peas, potatoes, and butter (435 kcal; 34 g protein, 51 g carbohydrate, 11 g fat) with either ENZ or placebo (PLA) in a randomized crossover fashion. Blood samples were collected at baseline and throughout a 0-5 h postprandial period for measurement of plasma amino acid, insulin, glucose, and nonesterified fatty acid (NEFA) concentrations. Clustering of postprandial amino acid responses was conducted in MFuzz, and logistic regression for response groups was conducted in JMP 18.2.0 (JMP Statistical Discovery LLC). RESULTS: Plasma amino acid concentrations were not statistically different between treatments (PLA compared with ENZ) over the postprandial period (all P > 0.05). Leucine time to maximum concentration was significantly faster (P = 0.047) with ENZ (121.2 ± 55.9 min) compared with PLA (141.0 ± 49.2 min). Postprandial plasma glucose concentrations (P = 0.04) and total NEFA (P = 0.001) were higher with ENZ compared with PLA. Three distinct response patterns (clusters) were detected within and across all postprandial amino acid categories. Differences in habitual macronutrient intake and interactions between sex, lean mass, and BMI distinguished participants with an earlier time to maximum postprandial leucine concentration when consuming ENZ compared with PLA from those with stable responses. CONCLUSIONS: Multienzyme supplementation improved macronutrient digestion of a mixed meal in middle-aged and older adults. For plasma amino acids, this benefit was most pronounced in adults with lower BMI and higher lean mass, and the effect was sex-dependent. This study was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT05211440.

  PublisherDOI

• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Nutrition Research: Analytical Methods, Applications, and Key Considerations

  Journal of Nutrition · 2026-04-09

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fiber’s Utilization for Energy and Life (FUEL): A Randomized, Controlled Feeding Trial Assessing Metabolizable Energy of the Diet With and Without High Fiber Cereal

  Current Developments in Nutrition · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Integrating Prior Knowledge From Genome-Scale Metabolic Model With Metabolomics for Diet Assessment

  IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics · 2025-04-15

  articleOpen access

  Dietary biomarker metabolite detection is frequently studied but lacks insight into underlying biomechanism and suffers empirically from small cohorts of feeding trials. Our earlier work engineered 3 novel features to integrate prior knowledge from a genome-scale metabolic model with metabolomes to suggest diet-relevant underlying metabolic reactions and subsystems and improve predictive modeling. This study extends our earlier work by inspecting the impact of using reaction and subsystem features together, the effect of prior knowledge volume on diet assessment, and the robustness of proposed features for multi-diet assessment. We also propose a new feature in this work. We notice several experimental settings perform better with reaction and subsystem features together. We see that diet assessment can improve with higher volumes of prior, but the volume often becomes irrelevant as long as some amount of prior is used. We show our features generalize well for multi-diet assessment.

  PublisherDOI

• Microbial and Metabolic Impact of Walnut Consumption in Adults With Obesity

  Current Developments in Nutrition · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of Soluble Corn Fiber Consumption on Executive Functions and Gut Microbiota in Middle to Older Age Adults: A Randomized Controlled Crossover Trial

  medRxiv · 2025-06-13 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Background Dietary fiber may support cognition through gastrointestinal-microbiota mechanisms, but clinical evidence is limited. Objectives We aimed to determine whether soluble corn fiber (SCF) improved cognition and altered fecal microbiota and fermentation end products in adults. Methods In a randomized, double-blind, crossover trial, 42 healthy adults (45-75y) consumed SCF (18g/d) or a maltodextrin placebo control (CON: 22g/d) for 4 weeks, separated by a washout. Cognitive outcomes included executive function with event-related potentials, relational memory, neuropsychological performance, and mood. Secondary outcomes included fecal microbiota, metabolomics, and gastrointestinal tolerance. Tertiary analyses related microbial and metabolite changes to cognitive improvements using correlation, mediation, and moderation models, and explored SCF fermentation pathways with 16S-predicted functional profiling, shotgun metagenomics and in vitro culturing. Results SCF improved reaction times (RT) during congruent (β = -9.8 ms, 95% CI: [-18.4, -1.2], FDR P = 0.01) and incongruent (β = -14.2 ms, 95% CI: [-22.8, -5.6], FDR P = 0.003) flanker trials and increased Parabacteroides (∼4-fold, β = 1.44 log, 95% CI [1.01, 1.88], FDR P < 0.001). At the SCF endpoint, congruent RT tended to be inversely associated with fecal acetate (ρ = -0.33) and propionate (ρ = -0.36), while Parabacteroides was marginally positively associated with acetate (ρ = 0.34) (all FDR P < 0.1). Moderation analyses indicated that SCF-RT relation varied by Parabacteroides magnitude change. At endpoint, SCF increased predicted functional potential of carbohydrate-related KOs and pathways (FDR P < 0.05). In vitro culturing confirmed P. distasonis ferments SCF. Conclusion SCF consumption improved attentional inhibition, altered the gut microbiota, and selectively enriched Parabacteroides . Although mediation analyses did not support a direct microbiota-to-cognition pathway, moderation analyses suggested that SCF-related cognitive effects may depend in part on Parabacteroides abundance. Collectively, these findings suggest that certain cognitive benefits of SCF consumption may be partly underpinned by the gut microbiota.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MIND Diet Pattern Is Associated with Attentional Control in School-Aged Children

  Journal of Cognitive Enhancement · 2025-01-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Impact of Almond Consumption on the Gastrointestinal Microbiome and Metabolome in Healthy Adults

  Current Developments in Nutrition · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Author Correction: Metagenomic estimation of dietary intake from human stool

  Nature Metabolism · 2025-03-24 · 1 citations

  erratumOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Naiman A. Khan

  149 shared

• Caitlyn G. Edwards

  Pennsylvania State University

  88 shared

• Nicholas A. Burd

  Goodwin College

  86 shared

• Sharon V. Thompson

  Troy University

  85 shared

• Kelly S. Swanson

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  51 shared

• Andrew M. Taylor

  University College London

  46 shared

• Sarah K. Skinner

  University of Florida

  43 shared

• Riley Hughes

  41 shared

Labs

• Nutrition and Human Microbiome LaboratoryPI

Education

• PhD, Division of Nutritional Sciences

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2012

• RD, Dietetic Internship

  Ingalls Memorial Hospital

  2007

• B.S., Food Science and Human Nutrition

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2006