To launch a functional food on the market or to register a new food, intervention studies in humans are indispensable.

These studies should often be multicentre and carried out on genetically different populations. This means that studies should be performed in collaboration with other European institutions that also carry out intervention studies.

• One of the objectives of the CTNS is to design new methodologies for designing and carrying out intervention studies that are equivalent and comparable in all countries.
• The CTNS also seeks to evaluate individual consumption of a particular ingredient. It is, then, looking for nutritional biomarkers that are objective and quantitative biological indicators of the consumption of a food or diet.