More recently, he became a member of the scientific advisory board of the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture where he was responsible for the expert report on "food poverty in Germany during the pandemic." He is and was leading several working groups established at the German Nutrition Society, e.g., on “vitamin D and prevention of chronic diseases”, “personalized nutrition” or "ultra-processed food".

He has a longstanding interest in the interplay between dietary habits, metabolism, and the prevention of chronic diseases. With regard to his research projects, he took profit from large prospective cohort studies for which he signed major responsibility (EPIC-Heidelberg, NAKO-HMGU). His current position enables a patient-oriented epidemiologic research program, focussing on cardiometabolic diseases. He has extensive experience in dietary assessment and is leading the expert group “Diet and Lifestyle Factors in the NAKO Health study, a large population-based cohort study in Germany where he made major contributions in planning, fundraising and implementation of this project. Currently, he is also running a population-based study on dietary habits in Bavaria, Germany. He included nutritional biomarkers in different research projects, and -omics data were frequently utilized to study the relationship between diet and metabolism, eventually aiming at prevention of diet-related chronic diseases by dietary modification. Identification of high-risk groups, either metabolically defined or in terms of unfavourable dietary patterns is of major interest.