Dr. Tasevska's passion is sugars; elucidating their role in health and disease, and findings ways to measure sugars consumption more accurately in population studies. Measuring diet in an epidemiologic setting is a difficult task. Our inability to accurately capture sugars consumption in studies of diet and disease may well be masking the true effect of sugars, and preventing us from generating a clear, specific dietary guideline on sugars intake. The major focus of Dr. Tasevska's research has been on the development and application of a urinary biomarker for sugars intake; the application of the biomarker in population studies in order to determine measurement error of self-reported sugars intake; and epidemiologic investigations of the effect of sugars consumption on risk of chronic disease, using self-reports or biomarkers as objective measures of dietary intake. She first became immersed in this field of research during her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, working alongside her mentor, the late Dr. Sheila Bingham, a world-renowned expert on dietary biomarkers.

For her current project, Dr. Tasevska and colleagues will be conducting a large feeding study to comprehensively investigate the performance of two promising biomarkers of sugars consumption, i.e., 24-hour urinary sucrose and fructose, and carbon stable isotope ratio (d13C) in red blood cells, and to explore various approaches of combining the two biomarkers to generate a 'superior measure of sugars intake.' The study will inform future applications of these two biomarkers in population research, and will ultimately enable reliable disease risk estimates associated with sugars consumption.