NCI Cereal Innovators Webinar Series | Featuring Dr. Kalidas Shetty

From Left to Right: David Boehm, NCIs Technical Manager and webinar moderator, Dr. Kalidas Shetty, and Dipayan Sarkar, colleague to Shetty

Each month, NCI gives an update in the “Cereal Innovators” series that offers insight into the world of baking and cereal grains. This episode featured a very special guest: Dr. Kalidas Shetty, professor at North Dakota State University. Dr. Shetty went in depth to explain how impactful Barley can be when it comes to nutrition.

Dr. Shetty opened his presentation with the current challenges that our planet faces when it comes to the growing number of people in the world and the solutions that we have to the challenges of overpopulation. The challenges go above population but also climate change, food waste, and malnutrition. For each, Dr. Shetty was there to offer a solution to these problems. The solution that he discussed in depth was how we can combat these problems by going back to the basics of ingredients.

Fruits and vegetables are key in any healthy diet, but Dr. Shetty fears that we have gone too far from their natural healthy components and have added too many chemicals. Dr. Shetty mentioned how using barley in products will help to slow down the digestive process and allow for our bodies to get the right amount of nutrients that we need.  

Dr. Shetty also mentioned in his presentation that we don’t necessarily need medication to help with certain Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD). For instance, Type 2 Diabetes is the fastest growing NCD. Dr. Shetty believes that if we added more natural grains into our diets, the compounds of those ingredients would be a natural way to aid in digestion.

Research has been very important to Dr. Shetty and his team. In vitro studies allow them to see everything on a wide scale. They are then able to go in and pinpoint how they can use these different compounds so that we can work to solve many health-related issues across the globe.

Northern Crops Institute greatly appreciates both Dr. Shetty’s professional input and their involvement in our webinar series. At NCI, we continue to work towards fulfilling our mission to support regional agriculture and value-added processing by conducting educational and technical programs that expand and maintain domestic and international markets for northern grown crops. 

To get more information about this webinar, including handouts and slides that were used, please contact Krista Jansen at krista.j.jansen@ndsu.edu. 

For more information about future webinars offered at NCI, click here

Check out the recording below!