Paving the Way to Precision Nutrition Through Metabolomics

Abstract

Nutrition is an interdisciplinary science that studies the interactions of nutrients with the body in relation to maintenance of health and well-being. Nutrition is highly complex due to the underlying various internal and external factors that could model it. Thus, hacking this complexity requires more holistic and network-based strategies that could unveil these dynamic system interactions at both time and space scales. The ongoing omics era with its high-throughput molecular data generation is paving the way to embrace this complexity and is deeply reshaping the whole field of nutrition. Understanding the future paths of nutrition science is of importance from both translational and clinical perspectives. Basic nutrients which might include metabolites are important in nutrition science. Moreover, metabolites are key biological communication channels and represent an appealing functional readout at the interface of different major influential factors that define health and disease. Metabolomics is the technology that enables holistic and systematic analyses of metabolites in a biological system. Hence, given its intrinsic functionality, its tight connection to metabolism and its high clinical actionability potential, metabolomics is a very appealing technology for nutrition science. The ultimate goal is to deliver a tailored and clinically relevant nutritional recommendations and interventions to achieve precision nutrition. This work intends to present an update on the applications of metabolomics to personalize nutrition in translational and clinical settings. It also discusses the current conceptual shifts that are remodeling clinical nutrition practices in this Precision Medicine era. Finally, perspectives of clinical nutrition in the ever-growing, data-driven healthcare landscape are presented.

Effect of Diet on the Gut Microbiota: Rethinking Intervention Duration

“…Those with higher baseline of A. muciniphila also displayed greater amelioration in markers of insulin sensitivity after calorie restriction, and while these participants experienced a reduction in A. muciniphila abundance, it still remained significantly higher than in those with a lower baseline abundance [74]. As seen in Figure 2, defining and stratifying those with a diet-responsive gut microbiota within an intervention cohort may enhance the predictable performance of these dietary investigations, and would likely reduce the number of conflicting observations between similar studies [16]. In this way, identification of microbes associated with different dietary patterns can only be consistently supported by data which allows for the responsive profile of each individual's gut microbiota.…”

“…Permanent rather than transient changes to the core gut microbiota are likely required for long-term impact on health outcomes [16]. Durable bacterial implantation and proliferation may require continuous substrate availability.…”

“…One of the greatest challenges to understanding the relationship between diet, the microbiota and health, however, is to decipher the high variability in individual responses to food intake. These wide variations contribute to many conflicting outcomes in this area of research with failures to find diet-specific effects [16]. The homogenisation of study outcomes is imperative in improving our understanding of dietary interventions on the microbiota for enhanced health.…”

Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics in health and medical science: a systematic review

“…78,79 These areas are mainly focused on determining the effects of dietary compounds on the host metabolism aer consumption for a certain period of time, and determining biomarkers of metabolites related to dietary intake or phytochemical dose dependence, which have a signicant impact on a study of the diet-health relationship. 80 Compared with traditional dietary assessment methods, the application of metabolomics provides a more objective dietary intake measurement method for the identication of dietary intake biomarkers, which greatly improves our ability to assess dietary intake. 81 At present, the discovery of dietary biomarkers is mainly concentrated on single biomarkers.…”

Personalised REsponses to DIetary Composition Trial (PREDICT): an intervention study to determine inter-individual differences in postprandial response to foods

“…However, it is increasingly evident that one-size nutritional recommendations do not fit all. Moving beyond this to a precision nutrition approach would require appropriately designed large-scale studies from which multi-dimensional, high-resolution phenotypic datasets could be analysed to assess individual responses to food 2 . New technologies offer the promise of accurately measuring a wide variety of postprandial (non-fasting) responses in many people in real-world settings, allowing the numerous factors shaping individual nutritional responses to be identified, quantified and understood 2 .…”