Theme 1: Defining Fibre: Concepts, Methods, and Regulatory Perspectives

This session addresses the growing need for clarity in the definition of fibre by examining analytical methodologies, regulatory frameworks, and labelling implications across regions. Moving beyond dietary fibre alone, contributions will explore how differing definitions and measurement approaches influence research outcomes, product development, health claims, and international harmonization efforts.

Theme 2: Fibre in Food Manufacturing: From Functionality to Consumer Acceptance

This session focuses on how dietary fibre is being successfully integrated into food manufacturing, addressing key challenges in processing, texture, sensory quality, and product stability. With growing demand for health-driven, clean-label and fibre-enriched products, contributions will highlight practical formulation strategies, industrial constraints, and solutions that enable consumer-accepted, market-ready foods.

Theme 3: Gut microbiome: Mechanistic insights into fibre functionality and microbial pathways

This session will explore emerging insights into the mechanisms of fibre utilisation by the gut microbiome, and how these can lead to development of new technologies or interventions that predict or optimise gut microbiome outcomes. Contributions will bring together findings from human and laboratory studies investigating the effects of specific fibre structures, prebiotics, or synbiotics, on the gut microbiome, and consider their interactions with the gut microbiome in a dietary or therapeutic context.

Theme 4: Fibre in Health: Mechanistic Links to Health and Disease 

This session explores the latest in fibre and health research, with contributions focusing on the link between digestive and fermentation outcomes and whole-body health and disease. While epidemiological studies have long shown such relationships, intervention and mechanistic studies are now showing the potential power of fibres acting via gut-organ axes to influence specific physiological processes, highlighting many roles of fibre in various metabolic, systemic, mental, or neurodegenerative conditions and diseases.