Issues such as the increase in metabolic syndrome patients and growing medical spending have caused the Japanese people and government to become more aware of health. The healthcare industry has grown rapidly over the past few years. We see much information on health-related topics, but most of it is based only on experience or intuition with a lack of solid research-based scientific evidence. Health medicine is still considered an undeveloped research field and often times underestimated. Yet, health will always be seen as highly important, and we need to understand it further through fundamental research.

In 2008, the Life Care Center took initiative in launching the “Industry-Government-Academia Collaboration Project: Tokai Medical Health Science Research” in collaboration with the School of Physical Education and School of Engineering. In this project, we are working to verify the scientific evidence regarding instructions to promote health and anti-aging and to understand the mechanism of aging. Because health involves many factors such as diet and exercise that are closely interrelated with each other, it requires research in various fields. A special feature of this project is that, in addition to e basic medical and clinical research, it utilizes the advantage of being a university with the participation of engineers and researchers from other fields such as agriculture. More than 20 companies including food manufacturers, measuring instrument manufacturers and IT companies also take part in the project. Their scale ranges from large corporations to ventures and mid-/small-sized enterprises, and their specialties vary from exercise, nutrition, and genetics to stress and data analysis.

In order to carry out research activities efficiently, Tokai University and the companies have jointly established the Council for Promotion of Medical Health Science, which holds regular study sessions and exchange meetings to promote networking between university and industry as well as among participating companies. It has provided participants rare opportunities to become associated with companies from different industries, and has helped form a platform for joint development of new products, unique ideas and intellectual property.

Obviously, the most important keywords to achieve better health are “nutrition” and “exercise.” A wealth of information on diet and exercise exists, but there is little evidence on whether each piece of information is really useful for individual health. One reason is because techniques for measuring the level of health are still undeveloped. Rather than using conventional health science that relies heavily on statistical significance, we have aimed to create exercise and nutrition programs which can be customized according to individual variability and optimized for each person. We are also trying to develop new measuring techniques to be used for the development of health programs. With the cooperation of participating companies, ministries and agencies, and local municipal governments, we are conducting interventional studies on nutrition and exercise using citizen volunteers. To date, we have successfully obtained valuable data from 300 healthy samples.

Our next initiative is to develop new health foods and ingredients. Genetics is also an important factor in health, and we will promote industry-government-academia collaboration in studies to understand the relationship between lifestyle-related diseases and polymorphisms related to nutrition and exercise.

It is our mission to take the results gained from our Anti-aging Checkup Program and Life Care Center and utilize them for the maintenance and enhancement of people’s health, and to nurture young researchers in the field of health science.