 My main interest is nutrition in pregnancy and in early life. One of my interests is that we have a situation here in New Zealand and in the western world where we eat too many calories and yet we don't get enough vitamins and minerals. The three that I'm particularly interested in are iodine, selenium and fluoride. It's really important to have iodine for brain development. It's important to have it early on in pregnancy when the brain is actually developing so that we can have optimum brain function in later life. Selenium is also important for brain development, which is why it's important in early life. Fluoride is important for teeth development. I'm interested in actually assessing nutrient intakes to see whether people are achieving the targets that they should be achieving. For the three nutrients I'm interested in, we actually have low levels in our soil, which means we get low levels in the food supply and for fluoride there's also low levels in the water supply. We don't have a lot in our food supply so we're not eating it when we're eating food. One of the issues with the iodine deficiency is that we don't have extreme iodine deficiency so we're not going to see really other physical problems, but it's more suboptimal and it could be having a result on IQ, reducing IQ by about 10 points. It's something that's quite difficult to pick up, but it could have a whole issue for the whole of society. If you think that we're all 10 IQ points lower than we should be. We've done some small pilot studies looking at women in Palmerston North. To be honest, most of them have been self-selecting so they tend to be more of the educated women that we've looked at. So what we'd really like to do is broaden our research focus and get a whole raft of people with different ethnicities, different parts of society, different parts of New Zealand to see what's happening in terms of their nutrient intakes and how they compare to recommendations.